Seventy years separate the end of the Second World War from 2015 and yet the issues it raised remain fundamental to our understanding of the world today.
It was supposed to be the moment when the dark days of the Depression were set aside and the forces of fascism and dictatorship that fed on them were definitively overcome. But the 1929 Wall Street Crash that sparked the Depression has its counterpart in the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the persistent economic crisis since 2008. In the 1930s the establishment diverted attention from the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism by targeting ethnic minorities, and the Nazis and other racists reaped the benefits. Nowadays the European extreme right—from the populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) to the outright fascist Front National in France or Jobbik in Hungary—is again gaining in confidence. International tensions, always present when there is a system of competing capitalist states, reached a new intensity in the 1930s, culminating in world war. Today imperialist rivalries that were supposed to have been banished by the fall of the so-called communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989 and “The End of History”1 are reviving.
At the same time the Second World War showed that there could be a different trajectory. It ushered in huge mass movements that tore down the colonial empires that dominated the globe, defied and destroyed fascist dictatorships and authoritarian rule and drove forward the development of welfare states. These too have their parallels today, whether it be in the challenge to the established political parties witnessed in places like Spain and Greece, the Arab revolutions or mass struggles against austerity, privatisation, oppression and exploitation.
The impact of the Second World War was so profound and so widespread that for a long time it was difficult to achieve the sense of distance and perspective needed for an effective analysis. On the whole only the surface phenomena—the military campaigns, the biographies of individual leaders and suchlike—have received attention. This book is an attempt to go beyond that. Understanding the complex political and social processes of the Second World War is important not only so that we can establish the truth about a major past event but also to furnish lessons for today.
This book covers a wide range of countries and situations from major protagonists, such as Japan and Russia, to colonies like the Philippines and Burma, to the sub-imperialism of Australia. It also looks at European resistance, the Jews, and even a neutral country, Ireland. However, the global reach of the Second World War means that even these numerous examples cannot provide a full picture. To achieve a broader overview the rest of this chapter provides a point of comparison for the various situations discussed in the book by considering the pattern of events in centres of resistance not otherwise covered here. It then offers a theoretical framework within which the conflict can be set.
Contrary to later claims of anti-fascist intentions on the part of Allied governments, the Second World War began as a naked conflict between the haves and have-nots of imperialism. Britain and France had appeased Hitler when he seized Austria and Czechoslovak territory because they wished to enjoy the fruits of their empires in peace. This desire to maintain class domination (and consequent fear of communism) led Britain’s ambassador to Berlin to publicly applaud Hitler for “gigantic progress in the military, industrial and moral reorganisation of Germany”. Furthermore, the ambassador warned against war with Nazism because “Moscow’s chief aim was to embroil Germany and the Western Powers in a common ruin”.2
As a backbench MP Churchill criticised appeasement because he saw German expansion as the greater threat to Britain’s empire. But he had no principled objection to fascism, telling Mussolini in 1927: “if I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle…against Leninism”.3 When Hitler invaded France in May 1940 its commander-in-chief feared armed resistance might unleash “anarchy and revolution”. He was ready to capitulate once he could be “sure the Germans would leave me the forces necessary for maintaining order”.4 For its part Russia signed up to the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939, cynically agreeing to secret clauses that would partition Poland with Germany and give it the Baltic states.
The minor Allied states adopted a similarly unprincipled point of view. Poland’s authoritarian regime signed a pact with Hitler in 1934, its leader having stated: “I would like [Hitler] to remain in power as long as possible”.5 This ran alongside a pre-existing pact with Stalin. The Yugoslav government also negotiated between Axis and Allies. As one British official put it: “Rumour has it that several Yugoslav generals have built themselves villas with money supplied by the Germans. Perhaps we could help them to add wings?”6 Greece’s fascist dictator was perplexed that his country became an Axis target, complaining: “if Hitler and Mussolini were really fighting for the ideology they preach, they should be supporting Greece with all their forces”.7 In the 1930s Albania was dominated by Italy but when still greater control was demanded King Zog replied to Mussolini: “The King is devoted. The people are grateful. Why do you want anything more?”8 To general disgust, he abandoned his countrymen when the invasion began.
The step-by-step descent into all-out conflict showed how one government after another only opposed the Axis when there was no alternative to opposing the new contenders for imperialist dominance. Britain was compelled to declare war when Germany left it no choice by invading Poland in September 1939. Even then what ensued was a “phoney war” (Britain), “drôle de guerre” (joke war, France), or “Sitzkrieg” (sitting war, Germany). London’s bombing raids consisted mainly of dropping propaganda leaflets. By contrast, the British and French governments showed much greater enthusiasm for aiding Finland, a future Axis satellite, against Russia’s offensive. This “winter war” ended before help could be provided. Russia’s war began after Hitler reneged on a non-aggression pact in the summer of 1941 and attacked. The US entered the fray after Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Ordinary people found the outbreak of war equally unwelcome but for very different reasons. In Paris “the mood, despite the rhetoric with which the newspapers were filled, was sombre, resigned, serious; there were too many memories of the enthusiasms of July 1914 and the terrible rolls of the dead”.9 In Britain at the outbreak of war one of the team of Mass Observers gauging popular moods remarked: “There is no gushing, sweeping-away dynamo of ‘patriotism’”.10 Another noticed how many were “equating the employer with the friend of Fascism”.11 If there was to be war it must “put right first…the things that went wrong last time… Chief among these is certainty of a job, and then certainty of a decent house to live in”.12
Given years of propaganda glorifying armed combat and the militarisation of Axis societies one might have expected a different response there. Yet according to Hitler’s munitions minister, the population of Germany in September 1939 was:
Noticeably depressed… None of the regiments marched off to war decorated with flowers as they had done at the beginning of the First World War. The streets remained empty. There was no crowd on the Wilhelmsplatz shouting for Hitler… Not a soul on the street took notice of this historic event: Hitler driving off to the war he had staged.13
Mussolini’s decision to join Hitler in June 1940 was even more unpopular. As Spriano explains:
Above all there was a general mood of aversion to Italy’s entering the war…exemplified by innumerable individual testimonies… The Italian secret police reported with a single voice, unanimously and spontaneously, from September 1939 virtually right until June 1940, Italy did not want the war.14
Yet something extraordinary happened as the war progressed. 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. Opinion polls in the US showed rising approval for the war and President Roosevelt while support for peace initiatives declined.15 In Britain Mass Observers noted the same phenomenon. Since there had been little sympathy for imperialist war, this mood must have had a different source. Between 1939 and 1945 the meaning and character of the conflict had been transformed in the minds of many ordinary people. The way this happened varied from place to place according to the circumstances.
At its height the Nazi regime encompassed around 350 million people, from Norway to Crete. Although this fell short of the 450 million under the British Crown, it was still a considerable number. Bloody though the history of the British and French empires was, they had been built up over a considerable period and configured for long-term plunder of resources and provision of markets for goods. The Nazi empire by contrast was formed in the midst of all-out world war and, whatever the long-term ambitions of Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich”, its victims were expected to sustain that effort immediately and wholeheartedly. The pillage was naked and immediate. German policy was to seize labour (by 1945 there were some 11 million slave labourers in the Reich) and resources from invaded territories. For those who remained “the costs of occupying a given area are to be borne by the area itself” by what was euphemistically termed making a “contribution for military protection”.16 As one historian explains:
These financial tributes soon exceeded the total peacetime budgets of the countries in question, usually by more than 100 percent and in the second half of the war by more than 200 percent.17
Apart from the extreme violence meted out to those conquered, the consequences of this economic policy showed up in appalling famines. In the Netherlands some 4.5 million people were affected. In Greece 250,000 died (out of a total population of 7 million). Although these figures fell short of the Bengal famine produced by British wartime policy,18 Axis occupation provoked resistance movements in country after country.
These were politically differentiated from their official governments for several reasons. The pre-war period had been dominated by the Depression during which governments everywhere pursued economic policies of austerity leaving a vast gulf between rich and poor. This was often accompanied by repression to crush any possible opposition. For example, in Yugoslavia parliament was abolished in 1929. The Metaxas dictatorship in Greece was established in 1936 and immediately arrested 50,000 communists. While formal democracy limped on in France, when the war began hundreds of communist-controlled councils were suspended and seven communist parliamentary deputies were condemned to death.19 If ordinary people had reason to distrust their erstwhile governments, these in turn were unwilling to wholeheartedly back domestic resistance. Whatever resentment the establishment felt towards the Axis for usurping their right to exploit, they dared not endanger that system by arming their own people.
That is not to say there were no supporters of governments-in-exile (or in the case of France of a segment of the old ruling class) in Axis-occupied lands. “Official” resistance movements included the Chetniks led by Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, the EDES (National Republican Greek League) in Greece and de Gaulle’s Secret Army in France. They were well supplied by the Allies but made little progress. The aim might be to rid the country of Axis control but this must not put the rule of the establishment at risk. Two things followed: the arms they held could not be distributed to ordinary people and any serious military challenge against the Axis must await the arrival of Allied armies with enough strength to guarantee restoration of the old regime. This latter tendency has been called “attentism”.
These constraints largely condemned the official resistance movements to impotence or worse. In Yugoslavia and to a lesser extent in Greece, they even collaborated with the enemy against left wing resistance movements. The Chetnik leader, for example, declared that: “His main enemies were the partisans…and only when he had dealt with them would he turn his attention to the Germans and Italians”.20 The Axis appreciated this stance and not only supplied the Chetniks with weapons but coordinated operations with them.21
The mass popular resistance movements had quite a different purpose. Liberated from the pressure of their own ruling classes and backed by popular hatred of the Axis invader, they were able to draw huge numbers behind them in spite of appallingly difficult circumstances. Largely denied arms by the Allies and threatened by the Gestapo, Wehrmacht and the full weight of Axis imperialism, they achieved significant results at a terrible personal cost.
In Yugoslavia Tito’s partisans held down 200,000 Germans and 160,000 auxiliaries, suffering 300,000 dead and 400,000 wounded.22 In Greece EAM-ELAS (National Liberation Front–National Popular Liberation Army) killed 19,000 German soldiers and tied up significant Wehrmacht strength.23 In France a wide variety of radical resistance bodies launched large-scale heroic struggles. To assist the Allies with the D-Day landings the French resistance took on 12 German divisions and shortly afterwards liberated Paris against Wehrmacht opposition. Italy’s resistance mobilised some 200,000 to 300,000 partisans, kept some 25 Wehrmacht divisions occupied and cost them tens of thousands of soldiers.24
It was not just the impressive scale of the popular resistance that differentiated it from the official Allied war effort. While the latter wanted restoration of pre-war conditions (including all the repression and exploitation this entailed), the former wanted economic, political and social liberation. Tito, whose forces withstood not only the full force of German, Italian and quisling Croat forces (the Ustashi) but deadly Chetnik attacks and years of indifference from the Allies (including London, Washington and Moscow), wrote:
Our struggle would not be so stubborn and so successful if the Yugoslav peoples did not see in it not only victory over fascism but also victory over all those who have oppressed and are still trying to oppress the Yugoslav peoples…if it did not have the aim of bringing freedom, equality of rights and brotherhood to all the peoples of Yugoslavia…25
In Greece’s EAM-ELAS the same motivations were present. One female resistance fighter, speaking in the 1990s, recalled that during the struggle “we women were, socially, in a better position, at a higher level than now… Our organisation and our own [resistance] government… gave so many rights to women that only much later, decades later we were given”.26
The French resistance had many currents but, as one study puts it, they were “virtually unanimous in predicting and declaring revolution”.27 The tone of the resistance press, which attained a daily circulation of 600,000 despite the Gestapo, was captured by this article: “the masses will not act unless they know what the aim is, and it needs to be an ideal that will justify their efforts and great enough to encourage supreme sacrifice”.28 This went far beyond driving out the Nazis and involved:
Liberation from material servitude: hunger, squalor, the machine
Liberation from economic servitude: the unfair distribution of wealth, crisis and unemployment
Liberation from social servitude: money, prejudice, religious intolerance
And the selfishness of the oppressors.29
The Italian resistance developed in a situation where the population had had to endure decades of fascism (from 1922 onwards) while the economy was far weaker than in Germany. During the conflict living standards collapsed and malnutrition stalked the working population. In the winter of 1942-1943 mass strikes swept the industrial north and this, combined with the Allies landing in Sicily, led the king and Fascist Grand Council to depose Mussolini in the hope of extricating itself from the war. This failed as the Germans proceeded to occupy the north and reimpose the Duce through the puppet Republic of Salò. The Italian resistance for obvious reasons therefore had no allegiance to its pre-war government and its economic system. Although dominated by the communists, even the Catholic segment adopted a radical tone:
the age of capitalism that has produced astronomical wealth and led to unspeakable misery, is in its death throes. A soulless regime encouraged the spread of poverty that was beyond belief, sabotaged the productive efforts of the people and deliberately provoked man’s inhumanity to man… From the final convulsions of this age a new era is being born, the era of the working classes…30
Even in Britain, which was not under occupation (the Channel Islands excepted), there was enthusiasm for victory which, as Mass Observers noted, was indissolubly linked with the idea of a welfare state, a concept approved by 90 percent of people in polls.31
There were exceptions to this pattern, of course. For example, in Poland, a country which lost more people per head of population than any other but early on suffered the brutality of German occupation in the west and Russian occupation in the east, the resistance movement took a less radical form. Poland’s extensive “underground state” encompassed a range of viewpoints from left to right and included both the “official” form of resistance discussed above and more rebellious elements. In 1944 it was the pressure of the latter that compelled the former to give up waiting for the Allies and to launch the Warsaw uprising. In Latvia the sheer weight of the opposing imperialist forces was such that any hopes of meaningful resistance were extinguished. The 1940 Russian occupation was followed a year later by a German invasion. This was generally welcomed by the population and there was even a locally generated Holocaust of 70,000 Jews which pre-dated the German Holocaust.
The rhythm of popular resistance to imperialism in the Asian colonies differed from Europe. Here the Second World War had not initiated an era of foreign invasion but was a continuation of it. The British in India, the French in Vietnam and Dutch in Indonesia already operated with repressive brutality against subject populations. For example, India in 1919 suffered the Amritsar massacre during which some 1,000 non-violent protesters were butchered. In 1926 and 1927 Indonesian communists were arrested in their thousands and many were killed. In 1930 the French reacted to a Vietnamese nationalist attack on the Yen Bay garrison by executing many rebels and bombing villages indiscriminately.
The Japanese offensive that launched open inter-imperialist struggle in the East did not immediately change this dynamic. In India, for example, a local army was raised to fight to preserve the chains holding the sub-continent in subjugation. The burden of feeding this force pitched Bengal into a famine costing around 2.5 million lives. India’s Congress Party had offered to assist London’s fight against the Axis in return for a promise of independence at the conclusion of war. When its offer was spurned and repression stepped up once again, the Congress Party took the road of resistance, inaugurating a “Quit India” movement in 1942. Gandhi intended to keep action within the frame of non-violent civil disobedience but after mass arrests of Congress leaders it soon escaped these confines, becoming a mass movement from below. Leadership fell to J P Narayan of the Congress Socialist Party who explained:
India’s fight for freedom is at once anti-imperialist (and therefore antifascist for Imperialism is the parent of Fascism)… We work for the defeat of both Imperialism and Fascism by the common people of the world and by our struggle we show the way to the ending of wars and the liberation of the black, white and yellow”.32
Britain quelled the Quit India movement but to do so it arrested 100,000 people and fired on protesters no less than 538 times, killing several thousand.
This proved to be only a temporary solution as war severely weakened the European colonisers with France and the Netherlands occupied and Britain under attack. Taking advantage of this situation, Tokyo rapidly supplanted former colonial masters in much of south east Asia.
In such conditions the resistance tended to be pulled in two directions. As the Quit India movement showed, some hoped that Allied rhetoric about fighting for freedom and democracy could be converted into national independence. Others, such as the Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno and Subhas Bose, leader of the Indian National Army (INA), swallowed Japan’s claim that it was campaigning to rid Asia of white racist domination. The former worked uncritically with the Japanese till the very end of the war. Bose organised Indian army prisoners of war (POWs) into a force which invaded India alongside Japan’s army, though without success. In Vietnam, France continued to be formally in control for most of the war, though it collaborated closely with Japan. So, despite Ho Chi Minh’s efforts to cultivate links with the Allies, the resistance had no choice but to oppose both camps. Alas, it was too weak to prevent a famine, again created by wartime conditions, that cost 2 million lives in Tonkin in 1945.
While the Second World War began as an inter-imperialist struggle, it is clear that as it progressed popular movements also developed with their own goals. Both elements were involved in combat, but shared little beyond having a common foe (although even here there were exceptions such as the INA). An important question is therefore how the two currents interacted.
Once again certain rhythms can be detected. In Europe there was cooperation between Allied imperialism and resistance at the outset in the joint enterprise of defeating the Axis. The sheer weight of the Axis offensive left the Allied imperialists no choice but to call on all possible forces to oppose it and if resistance movements could challenge the Axis behind the lines this was welcome. The Allies were keenest to support the “respectable” resistance movements tied politically to governments-in-exile (often based in London) but since these tended to attentism, others might be considered.
The first European resistance movement to be recognised by the Allies was the Chetniks of Yugoslavia. At that point France had been defeated, the Soviet Union and the US were still to enter combat. The British state stood alone and unable to fight on the Continent. Churchill therefore decided to back forces which could “set Europe ablaze” and to establish the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to liaise with them. At this stage Western Allied governments were prepared to work with a wide variety of movements including those dominated by communists, such as in Italy, France and Greece. However, politics remained paramount since the point, in government eyes, was to assist the inter-imperialist struggle and nothing more.
Since many of the resistance movements were led by communists one might have expected major assistance from Moscow. Russia was so involved battling for its survival until the turn of fortunes in Stalingrad (February 1943) that military aid was unlikely but political support could have been made available. It was not. Stalin’s attitude was demonstrated graphically when the Communist International was dissolved in the same year. For him Russia’s need to work closely with other Allied governments to defeat Hitler took precedence. In its dissolution statement the Communist International declared:
the sacred duty of the broadest masses of the people, and first and foremost of progressive workers, is to support in every way the war efforts of the governments of [Allied] countries for the sake of the speediest destruction of the Hitlerite bloc…irrespective of party or religion.33
As the war progressed there was a cooling of relations between Allied governments and resistance movements. By the end Allied governments frequently acted with outright hostility as the ultimate purpose of the war came into focus for each side.
The case of Poland showed the role of Allied political calculations clearly. Although Hitler’s invasion was the official reason for Britain entering the war, while the struggle was in the balance London’s attitude was generally influenced by Moscow which, following the Hitler-Stalin pact, regarded the country as its to conquer. So Western aid to the resistance was limited. Although by late 1944 the Polish resistance had killed eight times more German troops than the Greek resistance and at least 15 times more than the French, it received respectively just 10 percent and 5.6 percent of the supplies committed to these countries.34
In the Far East resistance movements were unlikely to receive support from Allied powers either because those powers were themselves already defeated (such as France or the Netherlands) or because a strong resistance movement would be able to throw off the shackles of colonialism once the war ended. Only the US, which had yet to establish formal political influence in the area, dabbled with the resistance movements in places like China and Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was even temporarily counted as a US agent! But Washington concluded before long that its interests lay in bolstering the former colonial masters rather than forces opposed to foreign control in general.
In Greece, Britain initially backed both EAM-ELAS and the attentist EDES movement, a famous example of this being the destruction of the strategically important Gorgopotamus viaduct by a combination of British secret agents and fighters from both Greek groups. However, this ran against the political grain, which was to favour the more right wing tendencies. In France de Gaulle’s Secret Army received favourable treatment over other more radical groups. In Yugoslavia, in the words of one British official, Mihailovich’s Chetniks should be favoured by London over communist-led partisans: “independently of whether or not he continues to refuse to take a more active part in resisting and attacking Axis forces”.35 It required incontrovertible proof of Chetnik collaboration with the enemy to shift support to Tito’s partisans.
The official war aims of the Allies were supposed to be expressed in the Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 upholding “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”.36 But this was a sham designed to draw in the masses. The real stance of these governments was developed at the various meetings of the Big Three (Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill). One famous encounter between Churchill and Stalin in the Kremlin in October 1944 took decisions which Churchill himself described as “crude, and even callous”. Churchill’s account of the notorious “percentages agreement” goes as follows:
The moment was apt for business, so I said…how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in Roumania, for us to have ninety percent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yougoslavia?… It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down…37
In Europe therefore the usefulness of resistance movements to Allied governments decreased in direct relation to the declining power of Axis forces and the increasing possibility of imposing an imperialist peace. There was a tipping point, discernible almost everywhere, when the imperialists concluded that the benefits of popular national movements confronting the Axis were outweighed by the disadvantages of potential democratic interference in their plans. The transition from one phase to another was brilliantly expressed by a British brigadier writing about Greece. He argued for public disapproval of EAM-ELAS as follows:
we can expect them to be anti-British. Military considerations, however, demand that we should give maximum support…thus bolstering up EAM. Although these two policies appear to be diametrically opposed, this is not the case, as it is solely a question of timing. Our immediate policy should be the purely military one of giving support to the guerrilla organisations to enable them to assist us in liberating their country… This should give way to the political policy of no support to EAM as soon as liberation is achieved.38
This policy was followed meticulously. Germany was allowed to withdraw without interference from the Greek islands to the mainland so that the resistance could not gain control before the British were ready. When the Germans left Greece (a little too early for London’s liking) Britain rushed troops to Athens to destroy EAM-ELAS. They arrived on 14 October 1944 with the following orders from Churchill: “Do not hesitate to fire… Act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion was in progress”.39 Wholesale Royal Air Force (RAF) bombing of working class residential districts in Athens followed. By the end of December 50,000 Greeks had been killed. Thereafter Nazi-trained Greek battalions were mobilised to pursue a civil war which ultimately cost 158,000 lives.
In Poland, Stalin achieved the same effect by letting the Germans do the dirty work. On 1 August 1944, as the Red Army approached Warsaw, the poorly armed resistance there launched an urban insurrection against Nazi occupation that was the largest of the war. Although it only had arms for one week of fighting it fully expected imminent Russian assistance. But Stalin’s attitude was immediately hostile. The rising, he wrote, “does not inspire confidence” and was “a reckless and terrible adventure”.40 Not only did the Red Army halt its advance but Russia put obstacles in the way of a British-US airlift of supplies for the rebels, refusing refuelling rights to their planes.
In Italy the change in Allied policy also occurred in late 1944. An Anglo-American army had control in the south but Germany held the north. Since the summer of 1944 it faced what the Wehrmacht commander Kesselring called “unlimited guerrilla warfare”. The partisans fought 218 pitched battles and destroyed hundreds of locomotives and bridges.41 Fifteen republics were established in liberated areas at the same time. Yet on 10 November the Commander of the Allied Forces announced on open airwaves that the resistance should stand down and go home.42 To publicly disassociate itself in the very midst of battle amounted, in the words of a prominent resistance leader, to “an attempt on the part of the Allied command to eliminate the Italian liberation movement”.43
The critical moment for France had occurred a little earlier. Inspired by the Allied D-Day landing in June 1944, the resistance, backed by waves of strikes, intensified the pressure on the German forces occupying Paris. By August, Germany was losing control of the capital. At that moment the officially recognised leader of the Free French in London, General de Gaulle, ordered Parisians to: “Return to work immediately and maintain order until the Allies arrive”.44 This threw the Germans a lifeline and an enraged resistance fighter commented: “It was impossible to imagine a greater divorce between the action sustained by the masses and the coterie which had positioned itself between them and the enemy”.45
The case of Yugoslavia was an exception to this pattern. In the situations considered so far there was only one wing of the Allies decisively involved militarily with each particular resistance movement. For Greece, Italy and France this meant the Western Allies. With Poland it was Russia. In the case of Yugoslavia, Tito managed to balance the Western Allies and Russia by using imperialist rivalry between them. Britain and the US had belatedly supplied Tito while the Red Army was involved in the liberation of Belgrade. For one wing to have openly sabotaged the resistance would have given political advantage to the other.
As we have seen, resistance movements in the Far East lacked Allied patronage and so there was no period of cooperation, only hostility. With the exception of the crushing of Quit India there was little the Allies could do practically as long as the Axis ruled the territories in which they operated. This situation changed in August 1945. In Vietnam the collapse of Japan opened the way to a mass uprising which the Viet Minh came to head. The revolution swept all before it in the north, partly because here China’s weak and corrupt Kuomintang government had been allocated responsibility by the Allies and was in no position to exercise control. However, Britain was assigned the south and General Gracey described his arrival in these terms: “I was welcomed on arrival by the Viet Minh who said ‘Welcome’ and all that sort of thing. It was a very unpleasant situation, and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously Communists”.46 Using British troops, a ragbag of forces including Vichy and even Waffen SS soldiers, the revolutionary movement was blocked and the country prepared for the return of the French.
In Indonesia resistance was late to develop. The Japanese promised Indonesian independence in the future and under Sukarno’s leadership the nationalist movement cooperated passively. Tokyo’s defeat ended these hopes and under considerable pressure from a revolutionary movement of youth, the Pemuda, he was forced to declare independence. In 1945 the Dutch were in no position to retake their colony and turned to Britain to accomplish this. Britain, however, found itself overstretched. To bolster its fighting strength Japanese forces were enlisted! There followed a concerted attempt to crush Indonesian independence. Thousands were killed in pitched battles such as at Semarang where the Japanese fought and Surabaya where the British attacked the population.
Although by 1945 the Axis was defeated that did not mean a return to pre-war conditions. In this, the greatest of all total wars, Allied success had relied on the energy of the mass of the people not just in resistance movements but in official armies and on the home front in places like Britain and the US. Where the Axis occupied, official rule had been disrupted and the vacuum filled by unofficial resistance organisations. Therefore the idea that establishment rule was inevitable and there was no alternative to capitalism was questioned. In two broad arcs stretching from Beijing through Hanoi to Jakarta and Delhi and then from Athens through Belgrade to northern Italy and Paris the masses, many of them armed, were challenging for control.
Resistance movements by necessity could not arise using conventional organisational methods or routine bureaucracy. But in conditions of secrecy and illegality no leader could conjure up a movement by decree. When the Gestapo and SS were hunting down all opposition ruthlessly, self-motivated initiatives from below based on improvisation, rank-and-file commitment, courage and self-sacrifice were vitally necessary components. However, if by definition these were an almost classic expression of spontaneity, it was equally true that military effectiveness required centralised leadership. Individual heroism was no substitute for unified organised operations.
Spontaneity and leadership, decentralisation and centralism, which to an anarchist or autonomist appear to be inimical, were absolutely complementary and absolutely necessary. The historical record confirms this. Those resistance movements that failed to engage the masses through democratic participation and radical programmes withered on the vine. The Chetniks in Yugoslavia and EDES in Greece were good examples. Conversely, despite the deeply democratic methods employed by resistance movements (such as election of officers, no special pay for higher ranks, the overlap of civilian and soldier roles, involvement and equality for women), every one had a defined leadership. The actions of this group became critical at the end of the war when the ultimate meaning and outcome of years of titanic struggle were to be determined.
In many cases (such as Greece, Italy, Vietnam and Yugoslavia) Communist Parties (CPs) were the most influential. Their predominance had been earned before the war when they had opposed the establishment and proposed radical change, often at very high personal risk. Through deep working class roots that could articulate the popular mood, a strong sense of discipline, organisation, cohesive ideology and personal commitment, the CPs possessed invaluable tools for developing the underground activities of wartime resistance.
The CPs’ Achilles’ heel, however, was their devotion to Stalin’s Russia. In the mistaken belief that this regime represented “actually existing socialism”, CP leaders acted as tools of Russian foreign policy at the very same time as at the domestic level their members were championing grassroots resistance. This contradiction could remain unresolved while the fighting continued. When the war ended the situation became untenable. Either CPs accepted the spheres of influence drawn up in “crude and even callous” arrangements such as the percentages agreement or they broke with Russia.
A particularly sharp example of the problem was seen in Italy when CP leader Togliatti executed the so-called “Salerno turn” in April 1944. He insisted that the Italian CP “must abandon the position of opposition and criticism which it occupied in the past47 and enter a southern Italian cabinet led by a prominent fascist and the same king who had appointed Mussolini. Both were seeking left cover in an attempt to remain in power after ditching the discredited Duce. Since Stalin assigned Italy to Western imperialism its CP must assist in this quest. The Greek CP had the strength to see off Churchill’s challenge but under Russian pressure it made fatal concessions which doomed it to defeat in a civil war. In France de Gaulle was able to dissolve the resistance almost overnight due to CP quiescence there. There were exceptions to this pattern where various circumstances, such as individuals exhibiting greater autonomy from Russia or balanced spheres of influence (such as for Yugoslavia where Stalin and Churchill went “fifty-fifty”) helped resistance movement goals to find greater expression. China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia were examples of this.
Despite these obstacles the very existence of mass popular resistance meant the outcome of the war was not the one planned by the imperialists. The masses made their demands felt in a number of ways. India, Indonesia and Vietnam all achieved independence as a result of processes unleashed by the war.
In Europe the people were determined that they had not suffered and fought just to benefit one imperialist camp over another. They remembered the misery of the Depression that had followed the First World War. The ruling class were also very aware that the 1914-1918 war had sparked an unprecedented wave of revolutions that came close to destroying capitalism altogether. As one British MP famously put it in 1943: “If we don’t give them reform, they will give us revolution”.48
In Western Europe the ideas of social justice and social solidarity encouraged state provision of welfare, nationalisation of some industry and economic policies designed to avoid unemployment and so on. So the eventual outcome of the Second World War was deeply ambiguous. While the contours of imperialism were redrawn in favour of two new superpowers (the US and the Soviet Union), the break-up of traditional empires and an apparent “social democratic consensus” set a new pattern in many Western countries.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the second is critical analysis. The conventional view of the Second World War subordinates everything to a struggle between nations with fascists on one side and democrats on the other. That is both the starting point and the end point, and the meaning of terms like “war”, “fascism”, “democracy” or “nation” is treated as self-evident. However, a proper understanding of the 1939-1945 period requires this scenario to be stood on its head. The fighting, the states involved, their ideologies and political institutions need to be rooted in their social context—the system of capitalism.
Capitalism is a system torn by two central antagonisms. One is between capitalists themselves who compete to survive and accumulate. From this vantage point the formation of hostile blocs and the outbreak of the Second World War emerge as a clash between ruling classes advancing their own interests. However, this was also a total war which drew entire populations into its gaping maw. The masses were not passive tools and their relations with the rulers, both Axis and Allied, were shaped by the second key contradiction of capitalism—between exploiters and exploited.
The key institution mediating these twin contradictions was the state. It is through the state that capitalists collectively enforce their internal and external goals. Exploitation within a state’s territory is maintained by the carrot or the stick, democracy being an example of the former and fascism an example of the latter. It was therefore secondary that some of the leading Allied powers were parliamentary democracies while their opponents were fascist. Thus Stalinist Russia and Greece, both dictatorships, fought with the Allies while Finland, a member of the Axis coalition, remained a parliamentary democracy throughout the war.
When capitalist states use their power to further capitalist interests externally, to gain control of resources and people beyond their borders for the purpose of exploitation, this constitutes imperialism. During 1939-1945 the Axis powers found that in a world where there was virtually no “free” territory left achieving this goal involved the elimination of rival capitalist entities. So the Second World War was initiated by the most powerful capitalist state machines which fought each other. As such, it was not a battle of nations (if that term is used in the sense of the people in general) but of imperialist blocs.
What of the smaller states that fell victim to Axis expansion? They claimed a common “national” interest linking government, capitalists and the people. However, in practice more often than not the needs of exploitation took precedence over any hostility that these ruling classes felt towards imperialism. Therefore rather than consistently throw their lot in with the people and maintain independence from imperialist influence, the capitalists relied on one or other of the imperialist camps.
For ordinary people the continuation of capitalist drives from the top opened a gap between official propaganda and the lived reality of wartime conditions. Consequently the masses developed a host of activities from below through which they strove for their own interests in opposition to the top of society. Imperialism and exploitation engendered anti-imperialism and radical resistance. The concept of national interest was tested to destruction by mass struggles for justice, democracy and equality.
Unlike their enemies, the major Allied powers such as Britain, France and the Soviet Union had a long history of imperialist activity. Before 1939 Britain, France and the Soviet Union controlled more than half of the globe’s land mass: the British Empire encompassed a quarter of the world, France’s possessions gave it almost a tenth and Stalin controlled a sixth. Up to that point the US state relied less on external state action, the focus having been internal expansion across the North American continent and exploitation of an imported labour force, many being slaves.
The Allies claimed to be acting in self-defence during the Second World War and this seemed plausible as their rivals could only build empires of their own by seizing land from the established plunderers. Moreover Allied governments could don the mantle of democracy. Their gradual accretion of colonies and the fact that it often involved overcoming economically weak areas meant that domestic populations did not have to be directly harnessed to achieve external expansion. There could thus be a relative separation between politics at home (which might take parliamentary form) and imperialist foreign policy dressed up in benign clothing such as a civilising Christian mission or in the case of Russia “actually existing socialism”. When MPs at Westminster accused Churchill of endangering Britain’s colonies by signing up to the democratic principles of the Atlantic Charter he replied that it did “not qualify in any way…the British Empire” and only applied to “the states and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke”.49
By contrast the chief Axis powers were late starters in the imperial race. Japan’s Meiji Restoration took place in 1867 while Italy and Germany only unified in 1870 and 1871 respectively. The first two gained nothing from their efforts in the First World War while Germany lost what little it had grabbed. This humiliation was compounded by internal crises during the inter-war years ranging from Japan’s 1918 rice riots, to Italy’s “Two Red Years” (1919-1921) and the German Revolution (1918-1923). Social upheaval threatened the ruling classes who turned to counter-revolutionary forces such as militarism, Italian fascism and Nazism to resolve both internal and external difficulties.
Their extreme right ideology wiped out domestic opposition (trade unions and political parties) and liquidated democratic rights. With the working class largely silenced, Axis governments aimed to make the respective populations obedient instruments of totalitarian, racist and aggressive imperialist expansion. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with chapters on “The Struggle against the Red Front” at home and “The Eastern Orientation” of conquest, encapsulated this strategy perfectly. Though the underlying process was the same, what had taken the Allies decades even centuries to achieve, the Axis felt they needed to consolidate in months, years at the most, and this lent a peculiarly sharp edge to their policies.
Nor was the turn to authoritarianism unique to the leading Axis powers. In 1920 most European countries had some form of parliamentary democracy. But the threat posed by communist revolution in the early 1920s and the impact of the 1929 Wall Street Crash meant that by 1939 this had disappeared everywhere except for the Western fringe of the Continent. The cancer was systemic.
While the rhetoric employed by Axis and Allies differed, the underlying substance of their imperialisms did not. For the ruling classes of Europe there was no principled distinction drawn between democracy and fascism since these were merely varieties of domination. For example, during the Spanish Civil War, Italy and Germany actively contributed to Franco’s smashing of the Republic. Although Britain and France feigned neutrality, they ensured the Republic received no assistance. Meanwhile the US turned a profit supplying oil to both sides. The British and French establishments had no qualms about appeasing Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito in the 1930s and only turned to war when Axis expansion became a clear threat to their hegemony. Russia had opposed appeasement but in 1939 Stalin concluded a pact with Hitler that included the seizure of the Baltic states and the partitioning of Poland with Germany. This was the green light the Führer needed to unleash the war which began two weeks later.
When appeasement failed and it came to blows these were on lines set out in 1932 by Stanley Baldwin: “you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy…when the next war comes”.50 True to this strategy, the RAF conducted “area bombing” which killed 600,000 German civilians culminating in the Dresden firestorm in February 1945 which cost some 40,000 lives.
For their part the Nazis foresaw a Grossraumwirtschaft (macroeconomic space) in Eastern Europe. Planners deemed “a third of the [Polish] population…surplus to requirements” and “a barrier to capital formation”.51 Millions were to be slaughtered. In the Far East, Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere meant shocking exploitation and violence across a vast swathe of territory.
Capitalist ruling classes that fell victim to the Axis responded on a strictly profit and loss basis. The French establishment concluded after brief resistance that it would be better to collaborate and accept occupation of the majority of the country than risk revolution by arming its workers. Some ruling classes enthusiastically sided with the Axis such as in Austria; some split between the two camps (as was the case initially in Yugoslavia); while yet others formed governments-in-exile and waited for Allied armies to restore their property and rights. Where temporary marriages of convenience between Allied governments and resistance movements had been arranged, they were repudiated as soon as the defeat of the Axis made divorce decently possible.
The war ended with Washington deploying nuclear weapons. Previously on the US western seaboard the entire population of Japanese ethnic origin (including US citizens) was thrown into concentration camps because “the Occidental eye cannot readily distinguish one Japanese resident from another” and some could be spies. In Japan itself the US sought to kill “the enemy wherever he or she is in the greatest possible numbers in the shortest possible time. For us there are no civilians in Japan”.52 By 1945 Tokyo was suing for peace behind the scenes. Nonetheless atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were deliberately selected as areas to experiment with the new weapon because they were “closely surrounded by workers’ houses”.53
For the capitalists the Second World War was about imperialist rivalry through and through.
So far we have focused on the motivations of the tiny capitalist minority. To grasp the role of the vast majority it is useful to compare the Second World War with the 1914-1918 war. Between 1914 and 1918 fighting was more geographically restricted, relatively static and often bogged down in trench warfare. There was little change to the status quo in terms of who exploited resources and people within national borders. With little success to show on either side, one aspect of imperialism—the merciless battle between capitalist rivals—became salient. Luxemburg exposed this clearly when she wrote:
The cannon fodder loaded onto trains in August and September is moldering in the killing fields of Belgium, the Vosges, and Masurian Lakes where the profits are springing up like weeds. Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth—there stands bourgeois society…the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.54
Pointless mass slaughter remained the First World War’s most prominent feature and on the military plane it ended as an “armistice” rather than outright victory for either bloc.
When the propaganda of “national salvation” was exposed as a hollow lie, slogans such as the one issued in Germany by Karl Liebknecht, “The enemy is at home”, or Lenin’s appeal for “revolutionary defeatism”, gained wide popularity despite initial support given to the war by the Second International socialist parties. A mass determination that the fighting must stop led to revolutions that finally ended the conflict. Class war ended imperialist war.
The course of the Second World War was different for a number of reasons. Instead of trenches the Axis used tanks, warplanes and Blitzkrieg tactics to achieve large-scale territorial gains in the early period. Berlin and Tokyo not only broke the states of their rival capitalist competitors; they moved on to exploit subjugated populations using brutal repression justified through racist ideology. This produced a far more complex situation than during the First World War.
In European areas of Axis occupation the invaders initially succeeded in both eliminating local ruling class competition and exploiting their populations. If local rulers chose exile in response, for the mass of people the chief enemy “at home” was Berlin or Tokyo. Where the establishment collaborated with the invader in the hope of being a junior partner in exploitation, there was now a dual enemy “at home”.
For the colonies the severe weakening of the European masters by Axis forces removed imperialist domination of one sort but brought another in the form of Japan’s army.
Many in the Allied heartlands of Britain, the US and the Soviet Union could see that their ruling class’s sole interest in the fight remained the securing of continued domination at home and abroad but they also distinguished between this “normal” system of exploitation and a new threat of untrammelled fascist dictatorship.
Whichever situation applied, the First World War’s precise sequence of working class movement collapse at the outset and outright class war at the end was not replicated in the Second. Instead there was, during the conflict itself, something called “people’s war”, a phenomenon which could mean very different things from place to place. For example, even within the Axis countries where the crippling impact of Nazism, fascism and militarism had been most pronounced, resistance never entirely ceased. Eventual defeat by the Allies created possibilities for a large-scale revival of movements from below which were seized upon but frustrated in Italy and stifled in Germany.
The term “people’s war” is correct but problematic. The phrase was common during the 1939-1945 period and corresponded to the resistance movements, anti-colonial liberation struggles and a host of popular activities which the masses injected into the war process to express their aspiration for an end to oppression and exploitation.
However, the Communist International (Comintern) gave it a peculiar twist to justify Stalinist policy. After Hitler repudiated his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia, Moscow linked itself to London and Washington claiming that Allied governments and masses were waging a “people’s war” against the Axis. Pretending that “we are all in this together” airbrushed away the imperialist motives of those in power.
While the fight against the Axis could mask these tensions temporarily, the fiction of unity was short-lived. Movements from below collided with the aims of Allied governments, who, in their turn, frequently forgot and forgave their erstwhile Axis enemies in order to suppress the masses.
To conclude, the Second World War began as a struggle between rival imperialisms to dominate the globe. It retained this character throughout and no sooner had the struggle between the Axis and the Allies been decided than the Cold War, a new imperialist competition, followed. But if the stamp of imperialism is therefore indelibly marked on this period, so too was its opposite. The people’s war, often in spite of the intentions of those who led it, amounted to a rejection of capitalist imperialism and imperialist capitalism. It represented the struggle of masses of ordinary people for a different, better world.
Fighting On All Fronts is organised around national studies divided between the struggles against the Axis in the West and in the East. It begins with a chapter on Algeria which asks whether the Second World War was a war of liberation or a war of domination between competing imperialist powers. The US spearheaded a landing in North Africa to help it in a vicious game involving the British and both anti-Nazi and collaborationist French forces. In the turmoil the opportunity for real liberation driven by the oppressed population of the colony was born. With the announcement of victory over the Axis in Europe, the contested nature of the Second World War was put to the test: Algerians celebrating the defeat of the Axis as the prelude to freedom were gunned down by the French authorities.
Southern Ireland is the only country in this collection to have remained neutral during the Second World War but this did not mean peace. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a bombing campaign to finally expel the British from the whole island. The Irish government did not want its compromise with London disturbed and repressed the IRA. At the same time left wing forces such as the Communist Party wanted Ireland to fight on the British side. The argument put was that the Axis represented imperialist aggression, which was true enough but ignored the imperialist aggression of the Allies. Ireland may have been technically neutral but it was nonetheless drawn into the politics that the conflict reflected.
The chapter on Jews looks at Eastern Europe. Millions fell victim to Nazism but their history has fallen victim to the Zionist project of the Israeli state. This portrays them as surrounded by hostile compatriots and passively submitting to the Holocaust (the sub-text being Jews today must oppress Palestinians to survive). Jews were not a homogenous isolated group; they were internally divided by class and externally linked to class interests. Jewish resistance both fought the Nazis and opposed Jewish Council collaborators. One peak was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In Minsk a peak of a different sort saw a united Jewish and non-Jewish resistance under communist leadership (later repressed by Stalin). The author concludes that: “Jews did not go simply as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back against overwhelming odds and in the face of mass extermination. And they did not do this alone.”
The Netherlands demonstrate how a ruling class, caught between Germany and Britain, worked to balance between the contending forces, its various wings maintaining good relations with both. After the Nazis invaded this was summed up by the announcement that: “the authorities would strive, in the interest of the population, to continue performing as good a job as possible under the changed circumstances.” While several groups fought occupation, the domestic government sought “business as usual” and the government-in-exile encouraged only limited resistance. Both wings looked to a restoration of the pre-war set-up including Dutch colonies and especially Indonesia.
The Soviet Union proved to be the decisive factor in the defeat of Hitler. Stalin is usually credited with making this possible even if subject to partial criticism. This chapter argues that Stalin’s regime acted like all the other imperialist contenders. His campaigns were as much directed at the survival of the regime through crushing internal opposition as fighting Germany’s invasion of 1941. That the Soviet Union eventually triumphed was due to the heroic efforts of ordinary people and often despite the policies of Stalin. Yet this has been hidden from history. The state’s repressive apparatus was effective in distorting the true story of the Second World War and inventing the powerful myth of Stalin’s greatness.
The final chapter in the Western section traces complex manoeuvres surrounding the Slovak National Uprising. While for ordinary people hatred of home grown fascism and the Nazis encouraged resistance, various competing wings of the Czechoslovak ruling class looked to staying in power through an independent Slovakia or restoring the unitary Czechoslovak state. They were split over whether to collaborate with the Axis or to defy it by relying on London (with its history of appeasement) or Moscow. The latter had its own designs and tried to manipulate these struggles to its advantage. In the maelstrom of competing interests the popular energy of the masses was dissipated in what the author describes as “one of the largest—and shortest—incidents of armed insurrection against Nazi occupation”.
The section on the war in the East begins with Australia. While discussions of the Second World War usually focus on the major powers that headed the Allied and Axis blocs, this chapter looks at the development of an Allied sub-imperialism. It shows that weaker Allied ruling classes shared the same racism, ruthlessness and belligerence as the major powers. War was an opportunity to advance self-interest through colonial expansion and exploitation at home just as much in Australia as it was in Britain, Germany, Japan or the US. This did not go unchallenged. The Australian working class fought back, with women often in the lead. In the armed forces resentment at “brass-hatted stupidity” and support for anti-colonialism presented an alternative worldview to the imperialist aspirations of the rulers.
Events in Burma destroy the conventional narrative of the good democratic Allies versus the evil dictatorial Axis. Divisions between the former imperialist power, Britain, and the up-coming imperialism, Japan, were used by Aung San to forge an independent country at the expense of both. Initially his Burmese Independence Army worked with the Japanese to disrupt British rule and then switched sides when Japan headed for defeat. The complications this manoeuvring presented for the left, with anti-imperialists and/or leftists supporting different sides at the same time, and the contradictions of nationalism in an ethnically diverse country like Burma are explored in this chapter.
China’s experience in the Second World War was unlike that of every other country dealt with in this book because it was superimposed on a pre-existing process of revolutionary transformation which began in 1911 and only ended in 1948 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. When the Japanese attempted to seize the whole of China in 1937 they found a society already riven by war which set the tiny forces of Mao’s Red Army against the forces of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. This three-cornered territorial and social struggle therefore bore many of the features of war from above and below seen elsewhere but incorporated them into what Trotsky called “permanent revolution”.
The chapter on Japan explodes many myths. Japanese involvement in the Second World War was part of the inter-imperialist struggle in which the USA played as much of a role in provoking conflict as any of the various governments. At the same time the author debunks the notion of Japanese blind obedience to the emperor and passive submission to the government war drive. Despite government repression, industrial struggles, sabotage, mass absenteeism, peasant disturbances, even resistance among kamikaze pilots were witnessed. There were even anti-war demonstrations and defections to independence movements such as those in China and Indonesia.
The final chapter sets the story of the Huk wartime resistance movement in the context of Filipino history. The Huk movement was driven from below and therefore reflects both opposition to Japanese occupation and the social and economic aspirations of urban workers and the peasantry. Although US forces and the Filipino ruling class found it advantageous to use the Huk movement during the war, its radical features made it unpalatable to the establishment post-war. A wave of repression followed while many Japanese collaborators were welcomed into positions of authority.
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2 N Henderson, Failure of a Mission (London, 1940), p247.
3 Press statement by Churchill in 1927, Churchill Papers, CHAR 9/82B.
4 Quoted in C de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs (New York, 1998, p55).
5 Pilsudski, quoted in P Hehn, A Low, Dishonest Decade (A & C Black, London, 2005), p76.
6 H Williams, Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans (London, 2003), p27.
7 Quoted in C Tsoucalas, The Greek Tragedy (Harmondsworth, 1969), p55.
8 Quoted in Bernd J Fischer, Albania at War 1939-1945 (Hurst and Company, London, 1999), p14.
9 D C Watt, How War Came (Heinemann, London, 1989), p595.
10 Mass Observation, FR89, April 1940.
11 Mass Observation, FR600, March 1941, p17.
12 Mass Observation, FR 2067, p7.
13 A Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Phoenix, London, 1995), pp240-241.
14 P Spriano, Storia della partita comunista italiano, vol 4 (Turin, 1976), pp3-4.
15 H Cantril, The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research (New Jersey, 1967), p48.
16 G Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries (Verso, London, 2007), p76.
17 G Aly, 2007, p7.
18 See D Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War (Pluto, London, 2012), pp163-165.
19 Y Durand, La France dans la deuxieme guerre mandible (Paris, 1939), p13.
20 Quoted in Williams, p110.
21 K Ford, OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance 1943-1945 (Texas, 1992), p55.
22 P Auty, Tito: A Biography (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp256, 258; Ford, p66.
23 S Serafis, ELAS, Greek Resistance Army (London, 1980), p427.
24 L Lewis, Echoes of Resistance: British Involvement with the Italian Partisans (Tunbridge Wells, 1985), p25.
25 Tito, quoted in A Donlagic, Z Atanackovic and D Plenca, Yugoslavia and the Second World War (Belgrade, 1967), p138.
26 J Hart, New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance (Ithaca,1996) p24.
27 H Michel and B Mirkine-Guetzevich, Les idees politiques et social de la Resistance (Paris, 1954) p52.
28 Michel and Mirkine-Guetzevich, p156.
29 Michel and Mirkine-Guetzevich, p157.
30 R Battaglia, The Story of the Italian Resistance (London), p186.
31 A Calder, The People’s War (London, 1971), p609.
32 J P Narayan, Selected Works, vol 3 (New Delhi, 2003), p131.
33 www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/dissolution.htm.
34 W Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (Madison, 2007), pp33-34.
35 B Davidson, Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (New York, 1970), p106.
36 Atlantic Charter, p4.
37 W Churchill, The Second World War, vol 4 (London, 1954), p198.
38 Quoted in W Deakin, E Barker and J Chadwick (eds), British Political and Military Strategy in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in 1944 (Houndmills, 1988), pp131-132.
39 P Auty and R Clogg (eds), British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London, 1975), p187.
40 Churchill, vol 6, pp115-116 and p118.
41 Lewis, p25.
42 T Behan, The Italian Resistance (London, 2009), p211.
43 L Longo, Sulla via dell’insurrezione nazionale (Rome, 1971), p25.
44 Quoted in C Tillon, Les FTP (Paris, 1962), p318.
45 Tillon, p348.
46 Quoted in J Springhall, “Kicking out the Vietminh”, in Journal of Contemporary History, vol 40, no 1, January 2005, p119.
47 Quoted in D Sassoon, The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party (London, 1981), p22.
48 Q Hogg, Hansard, 17 February 1943.
49 Quoted in The Times, 10 September 1941.
50 M Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1979), p116.
51 G Aly, “The Planning Intelligentsia and the “Final Solution”, M Burleigh (ed), Confronting the Nazi Past (London, 1996), pp145, 147.
52 R Schaffer, Wings of Judgment (Oxford, 1985), p147.
53 Quoted in B J Bernstein, “Truman and the A-Bomb”, Journal of Military History, vol 62, no 3, July 1998, p559.