Smiting the Asiatics
The colours have faded after five thousand years, but the incised lines on the temple walls are still clear and sharp. Pharaoh grasps a cowering victim by the hair and prepares to dash his brains out with a mace. The captive is portrayed as tiny, and so is everyone else – sandal-bearer, sunshade-carrier, soldiers – except for the king himself, who looms over the scene like a giant.
The ritual slaughter of Egypt’s enemies – usually either Asiatics or Libyans – appears countless times on buildings, slate palettes and ceremonial mace-heads, from archaic times right up until the Greek and Roman occupations of The Black Land. It is taken to represent Pharaoh’s ability to keep Egypt’s enemies at bay, and is assumed – since every Pharaoh seems to do his share of smiting – to be purely symbolic, with no particular reference to historical reality.
Maybe. But the ancient Egyptians were not always the peaceful folk whose architecture and artefacts we so admire, safe and snug in their fertile river valley. In early dynastic times the North African climate changed dramatically; what had been grasslands, well-watered with numerous rivers and oases, turned into arid plains devoid of plant and animal life. Only the Nile and its delta retained the ability to support human populations, and only then if its inhabitants switched from hunting and gathering to a settled system of fishing and farming.
The Nile was a lifeline. Its ownership was fiercely contested. Tribes from the eastern and western deserts had no choice: if they couldn’t capture a slice of Egypt’s watercourse they would starve. So perhaps smiting would-be invaders was a regular role for the king and his men-at-arms. Maybe, also, clubbing captives was a real-life ritual as well as a subject for ceremonial art.
We think of the Egyptians as civilised people. For three thousand years their way of life was so well-organised and so well-regulated – based on the Nile’s flood and the crop-surplus it produced – that they could devote a large percentage of GNP to cultural pursuits: art, artefacts and architecture which achieve near-perfection and still inspire astonishment today. We would describe them as nature-lovers, but perhaps they didn’t think of it quite like that; the animals, fish, birds and plants which they painted so vividly were simply their world – and what other world was there? To an Egyptian, life was so pleasing that they hoped it would continue, after death, in exactly the same way.
Order meant everything to them. The country was run like clockwork by an army of bureaucrats. It is unlikely that the peasants’ life was anything but arduous, but they usually had plenty to eat and could bring up large families: Egypt was always populous. Every so often able-bodied males were conscripted during the flood season to work on one of the king’s building projects. We assume this was an imposition, but perhaps it wasn’t; excavations at the Giza pyramid field have uncovered enormous kitchens supplying bread, beer, meat and fish to the labour-force; there were also hospitals. The Greek idea that the pyramids were built by slaves was always nonsense. On the contrary: the workers were highly-valued and well cared-for.
It is fair to conjecture that the pyramids, temples and tombs were built by enthusiasts, supported by families and neighbours who revelled in the scale and magnificence of these gigantic projects. There may be a good analogy with the erection of medieval cathedrals in Europe. If so, it is probable that providing the king with his eternal resting-place had a unifying, nation-building effect; it is even possible that this was its principal purpose.
If the King lived for ever, so would his subjects... hopefully. His relatives and attendants could buy a stronger guarantee by erecting their tombs close to his. In every case, as the paintings and reliefs attest, the idea was to make sure that the Egyptians’ heaven on earth – hunting, feasts, parties, gardens, dancing, adornment... pure pleasure... would continue posthumously.
This serene existence came at a price, but it wasn’t paid by the Egyptians. Gold, copper and precious stones were plundered from Sinai, Nubia and the Western Desert, whether the locals liked it or not. Thousands of prisoners of war were brought back from raids to work in Pharaoh’s mines and quarries. Foreigners had to be kept out; we see them mocked on pyramid causeways – almost caricatures, alien and ugly, nothing like the ever-youthful Egyptians. They are either starving, with their ribs sticking out, or parading in front of the king with their arms bound behind their backs.
Or being smited.
This was the Bronze Age. Homer’s Greeks and Trojans thought nothing of killing every man, woman, child and animal in a captured city. It was considered peculiar if they didn’t. To be a hero meant killing another hero, enslaving his family and stealing his property. I try to remember, when I look at a delicate painting of Egyptian princesses smelling lotus-flowers five thousand years ago, that for Egypt’s neighbours life was anything but a bowl of roses.
Free Fall - A Memoir
Most of us think people who jump out of aeroplanes for fun are a bit odd. They are probably right. I spent two years at it, and looking back I can’t help thinking it was a strange way to spend weekends.
My pal and I were interested in aerobatics. We used to turn up early at Biggin Hill and hope the weather would be clear enough for a couple of hours’ practice. We were often disappointed; this was south-east England and the airfield was 200 metres above sea-level. If there was any overcast around it would settle over Biggin and stay there.
On cloudy days we drove down the motorway to another World War II airfield at a lower elevation. Headcorn was paradise for anyone who liked aeroplanes: the hangars were full of Mustangs, Stampes and Zlins, it had a flying-club and an aviation museum full of relics from the Battle of Britain. It was also the main parachuting centre in south-east England.
One Saturday we watched the free-fall club diving out of their Cessna, dropping like stones for twenty seconds, snapping open their canopies and steering themselves down to land elegantly in front of the control tower. We looked at each other: we had to try this.
There was a two-day training course. We learnt how to climb out of the aeroplane, how to adopt the ‘spread’ position – arms and legs extended so as to make your centre of gravity lower - how to operate the reserve parachute mounted on your chest, and how to land. In those days the canopies were round and had hardly any steering ability, so the idea was to face into the wind as you were about to hit the grass and then roll on impact.
This was all good fun because we were still on the ground.
Then we were told to get ready for the next lift.
Cramming three parachutists, a jump-master and a pilot into a small aircraft is not easy. Your body and equipment are wedged between the fuselage and a companion, one leg entwined with theirs, your main parachute preventing backward movement and your reserve parachute preventing breathing. As the aircraft takes off you start to feel cold. It gets colder as you circle up to 1,000 metres. There is no door. The rush of air and the height chill your bones. By the time you reach jumping altitude you actually want to get out.
First the jumpmaster guides the pilot over the jumping zone and throws out a streamer. This tells him the direction of the wind. You try not to look too closely. You are freezing and cramped. Your brain is numb.
My first jump is still a vivid memory.
The jumpmaster tapped me on the arm and said: ‘Out!’ I hauled myself onto the step under the wing as I had been trained. My mind was disengaged: I was trying to remember the instructions. The rush of the wind took my breath away; I could hardly hold on. The jumpmaster leaned out next to me, then shouted: ‘Go!’ and I hopped backwards, counting one-two-three. All I could see through my goggles was the aircraft disappearing overhead.
My rig was attached to the aircraft by a ‘static line’ which operated it automatically, pulling the canopy up and open from my back; this is why the ‘spread’ position is important. Instead I curled into a ball. When the canopy opened it spun me round and one leg got caught in the lines.
But I didn’t care. I was alive! Above me the beautiful green canopy, below me my boots and a panorama of the airfield and the countryside, every house, field and animal bright and vivid in the clear air. I spent a long time contemplating the view... then the ground was rushing up towards me, and at the last moment I tried to turn the parachute into the wind.
I hit the ground in a tumble, tangled up in the chute and its cords. But I was jubilant. I cannot really describe the feeling: an adrenaline rush unlike anything I had experienced before. I bundled up my equipment and marched proudly back to the club-house.
‘That was without question the worst f---ing jump I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen thousands. Don’t try it again. Stick to f---ing flying!’
The jumpmaster was an ex-SAS man with an army vocabulary but a kind heart. I pleaded and he relented. It was obvious that I lacked natural talent, but bit by bit I got the hang of it. The great day came when I was allowed to start free-fall, pulling my own rip-cord after a short delay. From then on I didn’t make too many mistakes, though once I landed on a very surprised sheep.
Over the next two years we visited parachute clubs in England, France and Germany. Near Paris we jumped out of a Pilatus Porter, a powerful turbo-prop which took seconds to reach jump-height and had seats, a sliding door and heating. In the West Country we jumped out of a Wilga – a Polish monoplane with a giant engine and an open body like a grasshopper; it went up like a rocket and the pilot thought it would be fun to see if he could make us fall out by banking sharply.
At an American air-base near Mannheim we watched Easy Rider-type marines jumping in trainers with cigarettes in their mouths. Two of them got caught on power-lines and you could hear their laughter a mile away. In France we jumped in a 40 kph wind; the French thought nothing of it, but on landing we couldn’t deflate our canopies and were blown from one side of the airfield to the other, using plenty of army vocabulary.
A friend in the infantry let us jump out of a Wessex helicopter. When it reached the right height it hovered, so we were jumping off a stationary platform. To our surprise, this was much more scary than getting out of an aircraft doing 100 kph.
I suppose overcoming fear was part of the attraction in parachuting. Or perhaps it was just the price we paid for the incomparable thrill of floating down from one, two or three thousand metres. I think most of us dealt with it the same way I did: putting our minds in neutral and concentrating on the mechanical routines of preparing the rig, getting into the aircraft, getting out again, counting numbers and pulling the ripcord. The exhilaration starts when the canopy opens; there is simply nothing like the sensation of being suspended in a harness beneath a silent hemisphere of nylon. Then you land and feel like a million dollars. Later, the pub, and everyone has a story to tell.
Parachuting isn’t dangerous – at least, not compared with horse-riding or rock-climbing. But some people think it must be. One of them was my girlfriend, who gave me an ultimatum. So, after sixty-four jumps, I quit the club and sold my equipment. I wish I hadn’t. A year later she was gone, but so was my rig.
Qadesh - War and PR
If you believe the Hittites, the Egyptians were routed in 1274 BC and fled home with their tails between their legs. If you believe Ramesses II, the Egyptians won a stupendous victory. Or, at least, he did: the pictorial account of the battle on the walls of the Ramesseum shows a giant pharaoh trampling all before him while his miniature soldiers look on in awe.
Ancient warlords believed in PR. But with no mass media their audiences were generations as yet unborn, so it was all a question of having the last word.
Alexander was determined to be remembered as a second Achilles (and in our part of the world has succeeded, though it’s a different matter on the other side of the Euphrates). He enlisted a historian, Callisthenes of Olynthus, to accompany his epic journey of conquest and write it all down. Sadly they had a row half-way along and Callisthenes disappeared from history. A suitable fate, you might say, for a PR man.
Winston Churchill was asked if history would treat him kindly. ‘I am sure of it’, he replied, ‘because I shall write it’. And so he did. He was not above presenting his version of the facts and making sure that contrary evidence was suppressed. For example, he realised that his notorious ‘spheres of influence’ agreement with Stalin would damage his reputation as a champion of the free world and directed that it should be kept secret – which it was, but not for long.
Haig was responsible for wasting hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives on the Somme and at Ypres (though he was also responsible for the 1918 campaign which defeated Germany and ended the war). He was a man of supreme self-confidence and believed himself to be divinely inspired, keeping a detailed daily diary which formed the basis for letters and dispatches to the King. It was revealed after the war that he falsified many entries retrospectively to show that his decisions were never ill-conceived.
When William beat Harold’s army at Hastings in 1066 it was important to prove that God was on his side. In the twentieth century he would probably have made a propaganda film but in the eleventh the answer was the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts Harold swearing fealty to William during his sojourn in Normandy. This event established William’s right to rule England, though it took years of brutal suppression to turn his claim into reality. Did it actually happen? No-one knows, but William’s army of occupation accepted the tapestry story as authentic.
Julius Caesar’s accounts of his campaigns in Gaul are models of military history: detailed, exciting and written by his own hand, they reveal the mind of a master-strategist at work. Here, too, the author had an ulterior purpose: to establish his credentials as the number one Roman of his time. His subjugation of the Gauls was meant to win support among the Senate, most of whom loathed him. We all know how it ended: Caesar’s ambition overcame his respect for tradition – ‘the die is cast’ – leading to the destruction of the Republic, and of himself.
During World War Two the use of mass communication to control people’s ideas reached its zenith. We do not need to dwell on Goebbels’ demonic skill in perverting the minds of young Germans. PR was used more ‘innocently’ by the US Marine Corps when it attached journalists from American towns and cities to its front-line formations with the task of sending home stories about the daring deeds of marines from Des Moines, Duluth and Detroit. The result, as intended, was a flood of applications from the best of the US Army’s recruits. The Marines became an elite and have remained so ever since.
Montgomery was a virtuoso in the use of PR. His victory at El Alamein, Britain’s first in three long years of war, was acclaimed out of all proportion to its significance, and indeed out of all proportion to Montgomery’s skill as a commander. Given its overwhelming superiority in men, machines and supplies, it can be argued that the Eighth Army should have beaten Rommel much more quickly and with far fewer casualties. Nevertheless, Montgomery’s self-esteem and his adroit use of the press created a popular ‘Monty Myth’, which out-lasted his failure in Normandy and the disaster at Arnhem.
People today are less credulous – at least as far as affairs of state are concerned. The concocted evidence used by the American and British governments to justify the invasion of Iraq was exposed almost immediately. Thanks to investigative journalists and the phenomenon of the internet we can, if we wish, dissect and reject the stories which our politicians try to propagate. It may be that their efforts are subject to the law of diminishing returns. But one thing is certain: attempts to re-write history with a particular slant, whether on papyrus, paper or plastic, will continue for as long as military leaders believe they can manipulate the truth.
Meeting A Veteran of World War One
Robbie Burns was a Cameron Highlander who joined up as a teenager and survived the Western Front. A friend of mine knew him and arranged a meeting at the Special Forces Club in London. Mr Burns was 103 years old.
I was full of questions which – boiled down – amounted to: ‘What was it like?’ Mr Burns was lucid, smart and in full possession of his faculties; he was also charming. But he didn’t want to answer my questions. He politely changed the subject to one that really interested him: his career in cinemas since 1918.
My friend had foreseen this outcome and gave me a facsimile copy of Mr Burns’ autobiography: ‘Once A Cameron Highlander’. Signed by the author, it is a treasured heirloom. The book has since been published and is available from Amazon. Modestly and without dramatics, it tells how a Scotsman just out of school dealt with the mad world into which he was flung.
Robbie Burns’ reluctance made me wonder how people deal with memories of events which are abnormal - so far outside anyone’s ordinary expectations. I thought of my paternal grandfather, who had fought on the Somme and at Ypres: he said nothing at all to his grandchildren about the First World War, but instead taught us to recite ‘Three Blind Mice’ in Hindi.
For him, there was little worth remembering about the battlefields but much worth passing on from his days in India. He had been a ‘rough rider’ with the Royal Horse Artillery, breaking in new horses. This was what he loved – just as Robbie Burns loved cinemas – and he would talk for hours about horses he had known.
My mother’s father also survived World War One in the Canadian infantry. He said little about it, but spent the post-war years designing military cemeteries in northern France. This told us how he felt about his experiences in the trenches.
His daughter spoke not a word about her activities in World War Two. In her eighties she admitted that she worked at Bletchley Park, where thousands of code-breakers had all been sworn to absolute secrecy. With hardly any exceptions they took it seriously, even decades later.
My father talked about his RAF experiences non-stop. World War Two had interrupted his youth and changed the course of his life, as it did for millions, but it also provided him with a storehouse of yarns and quirky tales. He, too, said next to nothing about the war itself; he gave the impression that it was one long string of amusing incidents.
I have met many other ex-service-people – teachers, friends, colleagues – who have shown the same reluctance to re-visit their experiences of battle in conversation. It’s probably necessary, for most of us, to bury such memories or edit them into a form we can live with in later years.
Fortunately, there are exceptions: the authors, the writers of memoirs, and the old soldiers who consent to being interviewed for radio and TV. Without them we might be led to believe, yet again, that war is noble and heroic.
Response to 'Josef Stalin' correspondents
I hope I will be forgiven if I attempt a collective response to some of the points and challenges raised by my recent post on Josef Stalin.
To begin with the ‘statistics’: the figure of 20 million appears to be the consensus among professional historians. This includes victims of the collectivisation famines, people executed in the purges, people who died in the camps, people who died while being deported, and those who were simply killed or otherwise disappeared during Stalin’s three decades at the helm. It does not include casualties of the Civil War, the attack on Poland, the Spanish Civil War, the Finnish escapade or the Great Patriotic War. Figures as high as 40 million are sometimes quoted but these seem to be regarded by experts as inflated.
Yes, Mao is ‘credited’ with as many as 50 million victims, which would make him (easily) the leader in this league table. What sets both Stalin and Mao apart from other contenders – Attila, for instance – is that they disposed of unimaginable numbers of their own people.
Britain did indeed provide military support to Stalin following the Nazi invasion. Some 3,000 British sailors died on the Arctic convoys. Millions of tons of aircraft, tanks, trucks, guns, food and kit were shipped to Russia from British and American factories. This factor was erased from Soviet accounts of the war. Oddly enough, Britain was the first foreign country to recognise the Soviet Union (1924). The USA held out for another ten years.
Churchill’s integrity in this and other affairs of state has been questioned. His antipathy to Stalin (and vice versa) is a matter of record. He explained his apparent volte face by saying that, if Hitler invaded hell, he would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. Less witty is his notorious ‘back of an envelope’ division of post-war Europe into spheres of influence during a private discussion with Stalin, who allegedly ticked the sketch-map in blue pencil. Churchill took this to signify agreement; all it actually meant was that Stalin had read it. The story does neither man much credit. If we are charitable, we can probably say that Churchill was hoping to ensure free elections in Poland, whose independence was the proximate British casus belli. If we are Czech, we would probably not be charitable.
From the Czech point of view, Neville Chamberlain’s performance in Munich and Berlin must seem outrageous – as it does to many Britons. While Daladier knew exactly what was going on, and was mortified by the episode, Chamberlain imagined that his great personal gifts as a statesman had saved Europe from war. Churchill described him as ‘a pinhead’. Hitler was even less impressed: ‘If that man comes here again I will jump on his stomach’. His description of Czechoslovakia as a ‘far-away country of which we know nothing’ was deplored by many, if not most, Britons, including my parents. British readers may like to note that the highest-scoring fighter ace in the Battle of Britain was... Czech.
My contention that Stalin’s military contribution was negligible has been questioned. It is based on post-war accounts of surviving Soviet military leaders – whose point of view may well be biased – in which Stalin is accused of irresolution, strategic ignorance and meddling. Curiously, this is exactly the same charge which Hitler’s generals levelled at his military leadership post-1942 (likewise in post-war autobiographical accounts). On the other side of the coin, it is undeniable that Stalin’s drive for industrialisation (a hundred years in ten) gave the USSR the productive means to beat back the invader. Here again, we might ask: who were the real heroes in this enterprise? Possibly the men and women who laboured, suffered and often died in achieving the impossible.
The central paradox about Stalin’s military competence was that he seemed to do almost everything he could to render the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack from its erstwhile ally. It has been suggested, and not just by his admirers, that he was buying time (rather as Chamberlain’s defendants allege with reference to his sell-out in Munich). The question remains: would a pre-emptive attack by the Soviet Union have thwarted Hitler’s plans? Could the war on the Eastern Front have been averted, or some kind of condominium achieved, with the consequent saving of millions of lives? Probably not, but it is one of the more interesting ‘what-ifs’ of Second World War discussion.
The imperial policies of the British in the days of their Empire have been referred to, presumably on the basis that a pot is calling a kettle black. As far as I can tell, the inhabitants of the Empire who condemned Britain for exploiting other countries’ people and resources tended to refrain from condemning the way in which the exploitation was conducted. Judged by the generally accepted standards of the time, and with a number of exceptions, the British seem to have gone about their empire-building in a relatively humane manner. The subject has been examined in depth by Niall Ferguson and Jeremy Paxman, among others. The key conclusion seems to be that Britain used its military and naval force to facilitate trade above all other considerations – servants, rather than masters, of commercial interests. It has been observed that, in so doing, Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind.
It has been pointed out by a correspondent that Stalin signed the death-warrants without emotion. He was a natural bureaucrat, so – melancholy though it seems - this is very likely to be the case. I had assumed that a man who took such evident pleasure in humiliating others would obtain real satisfaction from extinguishing them.
About accuracy: I am asked if the quotation... one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic... is authentic. I don’t know; it appears in a biography of Harold Truman and is said to have been Stalin’s response to Churchill’s prevarication on the timing of the Second Front. It does not appear, as the correspondent says, in any non-Western source.
I am reminded that the correct spelling of ‘vice-like grip’ is ‘vise-like grip’. True: this is one of the many differences between International English and British English. In British English the spelling is ‘vice’ for both the workshop implement and the opposite of virtue. This homonym gives rise to numerous English puns.
I would like to thank the correspondents who have taken issue with my opinion of Josef Stalin, the smaller number who have agreed with it, and those who have contributed a point of view. I would also like to thank Mr Stejskal for his interpolations.
Stalin
What makes Stalin notable is that he brought about the deaths of more human beings than anyone else in the 20th century, and probably more than anyone else in history, with the possible exception of Mao. Yet he is still regarded as a hero by many people in the former Soviet Union and by ‘useful idiots’ elsewhere. His vice-like grip on all the means of mass communication accounts for much of this false memory. Yet even in the west, the dotty idea of ‘Uncle Joe’ lives on, a cartoon fantasy of Stalin’s underlying virtue: gruff, severe, but ultimately kindly. Someone you could talk to. Someone you could deal with.
I think differently, and I lay at the door of this sinister man not only the 20 million deaths that he directly ordained but also the atmosphere of fear in which everyone in the post-war generation, on either side of the ‘iron curtain’, grew up.
It is nearly 60 years since his death, so from this distance we can consider his nature and his acts, and close the book forever on the idea that he was in some way – in any way – a force for good. He was not. The fact that he presided over the extraordinary feat of the Soviets in vanquishing their German invaders is beside the point: the Soviet people and their military leaders deserve all the credit for this victory, won at such enormous cost in blood, destitution and misery. Stalin’s contribution was negligible at best, negative in any clear-eyed analysis.
He was brought up to be bad. His father was a drunk who beat his son – who knows why? – with a venom that would have him put behind bars today. His mother presumably loved Josef but also beat him. On one of Stalin’s rare visits during his ascendancy he is reported to have asked her why she had treated him so cruelly. The answer is not recorded. His parents evidently taught him to love no-one, to trust no-one and to believe that violence was a normal solution. He became suspicious, probably deranged. From the earliest days of his career he was noted for his administrative ability but also for deviousness, deceit and misanthropy. Even Lenin, on his deathbed, warned that Stalin was not to be trusted with power.
He may have understood something useful about the psyche of people crushed and trampled over the centuries by exploitative masters. He transferred his seminary ideology lock, stock and barrel to the Bolshevik revolutionary creed. Yet from day one, as a terrorist, he used precisely the techniques of the class-enemy to compel obedience from the people he pretended to liberate: comply or die.
Stalin posed as a man of culture, with a library which he prized and a close interest in the work of writers, composers and performing artists. Between signing death-warrants he would peruse scripts and demand minuscule alterations to bring the work in line with his own version of the communist credo. Soviet writers, composers and performers tended to adopt his suggestions: the alternative was a slow death from starvation and exposure in a labour camp – not just for the victims but also for their family and friends.
The same fate awaited anyone whom Stalin suspected might be an opponent, or just a thinker. To survive in Stalin’s Soviet Union you had to be a slave, invisible or lucky. His successive Cheka variants had quotas: they didn’t really care whether or not you were opposed to the regime, they simply needed people to kill. They would drag you from your bed at 4 am, beat you, extract a confession, then make you kneel in a corner while one of them shot you in the back of the neck. They were doing away with 200 innocent people a night during Stalin’s purges. He knew all about it; he signed the documents and kept lists, which he annotated with keen interest.
Stalin’s performance during the Second World War has been described as inspiring, forceful and visionary. It could also be described as lamentable. He purged the Soviet armed forces just as the Germans were planning Operation Barbarossa, thereby crippling his own country’s defences while convincing the enemy that they had nothing to worry about. He insisted that his pact with Hitler was gold-plated, even going so far as to order that a German defector, who gave details of the next day’s onslaught, should be shot. He dithered and interfered during the Germans’ lightning invasion of 1941, preventing his remaining generals from doing their work and having them executed when they failed to carry out his half-baked instructions.
The Soviet Union – or Russia, as it became known for propaganda purposes – only began to win when Stalin stepped back and let the generals organise military strategy. As the Soviet armies gradually overwhelmed the invaders – at incredible cost - Stalin preened himself on the international stage, establishing a creepy friendship with the dying Roosevelt, who was completely taken in. Churchill wasn’t: he had judged the Bolsheviks as malign in 1917 and had not changed his opinion. But his negotiating strength was undermined by allegiance to an obsolete empire, which in 1943 was both bankrupt and militarily irrelevant.
Khrushchev thought that Stalin became drugged by power; the more he had the more he wanted. His memoirs record Stalin as inflicting petty, school-room humiliations on his closest confederates: Khrushchev was made to drink vodka until he was hardly able to stand, then to dance like a bear and then to sit still while Stalin tapped out the ashes from his pipe on Khrushchev’s bald head. We may think it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man... but the incident gives us an insight into Stalin’s peculiarly malevolent personality.
He is famously quoted as saying that one death is a tragedy but a million is just a statistic. I don’t believe he felt one death was a tragedy at all: he refused to rescue his son, Yakov, from a German prison-camp, thereby condemning him to death; he may have murdered his own wife; he was happy to see his comrades – especially those from the early days – disappear into oblivion, show-trials and the Gulag. It seems that he took pleasure, of a hideous nature, in causing death and anguish. But on the plus side... well, there isn’t one.
His treatment of Czechoslovakia is infamous. He made a show of supporting Czech resistance against Hitler’s fabricated claims on the Sudeten region, but also made it conditional on France taking the first step – knowing that the French government of the day was paralysed. In 1945 he encouraged the Czechs to rise up against the Germans - knowing that the 1st Ukrainian Front was stalled around Ostrava and could offer no assistance. The result is recorded on countless memorials in Prague and elsewhere.
After the war Stalin watched as the Czechs elected a coalition government, with his communists in a strong position, though without a majority. He then pressed Gottwald to stage a coup, with the usual Soviet paraphernalia of pretend-trials, executions and secret police. His legacy in the Czech and Slovak lands, as it was everywhere else behind the ‘iron curtain’, was oppression, fear and lies; arbitrary control of every aspect of life by little men placed in positions of total authority. The reality of Soviet friendship later became apparent when Warsaw Pact tanks clattered into Prague.
Stalin died miserably: he suffered a stroke, alone, which robbed him of speech and bodily control. His minions were too frightened to call for help. The comrades eventually gathered round his incapacitated body. His daughter described his eyes as yellow with hate. We might approve of this tawdry end to an inhuman human being; on the other hand we might think of it as a statistic.
There is a saying that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Josef Stalin is a warning from history: someone who gained absolute power and, sure enough, was absolutely corrupted by its possession.
Verdun 1916: Colonel Driant
At 7am on the 21st February 1916 the Bois des Caures erupted in a deluge of high-explosive which pulverised the earth, tore the trees to shreds and vaporised the waiting French Chasseurs in their bunkers and foxholes. By mid-day over 80,000 shells had fallen in a rectangle 500 by 1,000 metres. The noise could be heard 70 kilometres away. The edges of the craters overlapped, giving the landscape a lunar effect which still marks the ground to this day.
The inferno in the Bois des Caures started the Battle of Verdun, a ten-month ordeal which cost the French and the Germans 300,000 dead and twice that number of injured, most of them mangled beyond belief by huge lumps of whirling iron. Others died or were disabled for life by gas, flamethrower, bayonet, bludgeon, trench-knife, exposure to temperatures of minus 20, drowning in shell-holes and waterlogged ravines... and thirst during the scorching summer days when there was no water to be had and no way of getting any to the men in the semi-mountainous battlefield.
Verdun was described by its architect, Von Falkenhayn, as a ‘mincing machine’ and by the French army – three-quarters of whose men served there – as ‘the mill on the Meuse’. Von Falkenhayn’s idea was to threaten a key bastion which the French simply would not surrender and to use his overwhelming superiority in heavy artillery to ‘bleed them white’. This was the first and last time that a general planned a campaign with the sole objective of killing soldiers rather than capturing territory. It didn’t work. The French fought better than the Germans expected; by Christmas the Kaiser’s men were back where they started.
Verdun has been compared to Stalingrad – a well-equipped and meticulously-organised German onslaught meeting head-on with an enemy who would not give in, no matter what. The 100 square kilometres of the Verdun battlefield have the distinction of witnessing more fatalities per square metre than any other battlefield in history; 100,000 of these dead soldiers are still there, lost and undiscovered, somewhere underneath the earth churned up by 60 million shells.
The Chasseurs surprised the Germans on the 21st February by emerging from their subterranean hide-outs and laying into the masses of approaching field-grey with machine guns and well-aimed rifle-fire. They formed counter-attack parties under their Colonel’s cheerful leadership and re-captured pockets of the front line which had been obliterated by the storm of shellfire. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It delayed the German advance by nearly two days, which gave the French high command enough time to bring up reserves. It took another ten months for the French to win the Battle of Verdun, but it could easily have been lost on the first day, had it not been for Colonel Driant and his 1,500 troops.
Driant was a singular man. A native of Lorraine and a career soldier, he was passed over for promotion and resigned his commission to pursue a career in politics as a local deputy. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he re-joined the army and was given command of the Chasseurs (light infantry) in the Bois des Caures. He and his men played their part in the ‘Miracle of the Marne’, when Von Falkenhayn lost his nerve and ordered the his army to turn south before it reached Paris. Verdun was the ‘hinge’ of the French counter-attack which swung north and fought the Germans to a standstill.
From then on, for three-and-a-half years, the Germans stood on the defensive: digging deeper and deeper, pouring millions of tonnes of concrete, installing thousands of machine-gun posts, erecting hectares of barbed wire, constructing two, three and four consecutive lines of support trenches – while the French and British, with their colonial allies, squandered hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives in futile attacks on these impermeable defences.
Driant knew the Verdun area and knew what was coming. He designed a novel defensive system for his Chasseurs on their thickly-wooded hillside: blockhouses, bunkers and short, interlocking trenches, with carefully-planned fields of fire to provide mutual support. He told the French high command again and again that a massive attack was imminent: they instructed him to be silent. He used his political contacts to try to make the high command see sense: this provoked one of Joffre’s rare displays of emotion – he flew into a rage. Joffre also ordered the removal of the guns in the forts protecting the city. By the time the Germans attacked, Verdun’s concentric rings of 30 fortifications and ‘ouvrages’ could not shoot back.
There can be no excuse for the stupidity of the French high command. There is probably no excuse for the arrogance of the German high command: they believed they had thought of everything – eight railways supplying their jumping-off point (the French had only three, of which two were cut by gunfire); a mammoth artillery and logistics enterprise, with guns capable of throwing one-tonne projectiles 20 kilometres; overwhelming superiority in manpower; innovations like flamethrowers – used for the first time at Verdun – and soldiers who believed they would be able to walk into the French positions with their rifles slung. It all came to nothing: the French didn’t lose the territorial battle and the Germans didn’t win the battle of attrition.
Verdun nevertheless marked a turning-point in the First World War. The German high command’s self-confidence was shaken. The drain on the German economy was severe. The German army knew it had failed. Conversely, Verdun proved to the French high command that its doctrine of blind aggression was right. The mutinies in 1917 showed that the French army did not agree with its leaders; villages throughout France, still de-populated 100 years later, spell out the price paid by the French for their generals’ fixed ideas.
Colonel Driant died as he may have wished – indeed, as many of us may wish. He got up early on the morning of the 21st February knowing exactly what lay in store for him and his beloved Chasseurs. He gave his wedding ring to an aide with instructions to deliver it to Madame Driant. As the torrent of German missiles exploded around him, he made a point of walking calmly from bunker to bunker, foxhole to foxhole, cheering up his men with jokes and encouraging words. He stood on top of his command post, smiling, and congratulated his men on their marksmanship. He was shot in the head as he bandaged a wounded Chasseur and died at once.
Only 100 of the Chasseurs survived the Battle of the Bois des Caures. Colonel Driant’s body was found later by a German officer who collected his personal belongings and sent them back to his wife in Germany; she sent them to Madame Driant with a letter of sympathy.
You can visit Colonel Driant’s command post today: it still stands there, battered but intact, surrounded by bushes and trees which have taken root in the craters. At this time of year it is covered with wreaths, bouquets and small French flags.
U-995
You are walking along the sand-dunes on the German shore of the Baltic. On your right is the seaway leading down to Kiel; today there is a brisk onshore wind blowing white horses off the wave-tops. On your left the dunes are higher, bearing sparse bushes and a few stunted trees. Ahead of you is the small seaside settlement of Laboe – two hundred houses, a couple of hotels, three or four restaurants.
You turn the corner of a sand-hill and are suddenly confronted by a long, grey shape sitting on the beach. It’s U-995, the last surviving Kriegsmarine U-boat in Europe. The first thing to strike you is its pristine condition as the sun sparkles on its steel plates. You notice its strange design, streamlined yet bulbous, with three serious-looking guns on a kind of balcony perched on top. Then you might consider the sheer incongruity of this sinister war-machine parked among the deckchairs, kite-surfers and lolloping dogs: it’s as out of place as a space-rocket.
A little further along the coast at Heikendorf, U-995’s improbable resting-place begins to make sense. Here is the site of the U-boat memorial, a circular wall bearing the names of 30,000 mariners whose own resting-place is at the bottom of the sea. They are listed crew by crew on bronze plaques – hundreds and hundreds of them. Relatives have placed occasional photographs among the names and these attest to the extreme youth of the U-boat sailors; their faces could, and probably should, have been smiling out instead from portraits of student sports-teams.
U-995 has been lovingly preserved by the German Marine Association. Doorways have been cut in the bow and stern to allow visitors to walk the length of the interior, for U-995 is now a museum. Unless you are familiar with submarines you will be astonished by the complexity of the machinery, electrics and hydraulics. Every surface is festooned with pipes, wires, dials, control-wheels, levers, switches and gauges. There is something magnificent about the ingenuity of U-995’s builders: the pressure-hull is crammed with motors to propel the boat, submerge it, surface it and trim it. At the stern, giant electric dynamos charged enormous batteries to drive U-995 at seven knots under-water; in the next compartment, two banks of massive diesel engines gave her nearly twenty knots on the surface.
The U-boat is long but narrow. There is hardly any space for anything, least of all people. The bunks are squashed in amongst machines, pipe-work and equipment; there is a galley – about the same size as a small office-desk – and one toilet (the other was used as a food-store). Yet 45 people lived in this tube for up to 12 weeks on end... 1,500 km out into the Atlantic, endless patrolling, no water for washing or shaving, no fresh food after the first few days, more patrolling, maybe combat... then the long journey back to base on the west coast of France.
The whole point of U-995, and every other U-boat, was to fire torpedoes at enemy ships. They were good at this, sinking nearly 3,000 merchant vessels and nearly 200 warships during World War II. U-995 shows why: the torpedoes themselves are huge, finely-engineered precision missiles with 250 kg warheads; the apparatus for aiming and firing them – optics, range-finders, computing devices, hydrographic tables, torpedo-room crews, adjustable fuses, compressed air – turned the entire craft into a single weapon controlled by the skill of its captain. Good captains and lucky captains would return to the pens with a string of pennants fluttering from the mast-head, ready to be feted and for two weeks’ carousing with their crews.
Towards the end of 1942 it didn’t matter how good the captains were, and there was no more luck. The British, Canadians and Americans saw U-boats as a deadly threat and made winning the Battle of the Atlantic their number one priority. Rapid advances in airborne and naval radar meant that U-boats could be spotted from over the horizon; ultra-long-range aircraft meant there was nowhere to hide, not even in the middle of the ocean. Allied escort craft learnt how to hunt, trap and kill the U-boats beneath the surface of the sea. Eight hundred were destroyed, and their crews with them.
As you stumble, crouching, through the air-locked compartments inside U-995, you can’t help wondering what it must have been like for these hunters to have been hunted in their turn. They knew they only had 20 hours’ supply of air; when it ran out they would be forced to surface and confront the guns of an enemy much larger, much faster and much more heavily-armed. Even if they lasted that long... depth-charging quickly became a science and the U-boat hunters were adept at ‘cat-and-mouse’ tactics using sonar. With a destroyer overhead they must have known that their chances of survival were slim. They might not have known quite how slim: today we have figures to show that 70 per cent of crew-members were drowned inside their U-boats.
The story of the submarines tells us something about the frailty of ethics in twentieth century warfare. At the beginning of World War I a U-boat was required to stop its quarry, make sure that the crew and passengers got into lifeboats, and only then sink the vessel – usually with its deck-gun. The rules were soon broken on both sides: some merchant ships were equipped as decoys, pretending to surrender and then attacking the U-boats with concealed guns as soon as they were within range, while the more aggressive U-boat commanders abandoned the conventions and sank their victims, using torpedoes, by surprise.
U-boat warfare in World War II was unrestricted, by order of the High Command. Yet there are stories of U-boat captains putting merchant crews into lifeboats – and even supplying them with provisions and cigarettes – just as there are stories of fighter pilots, on both sides, guiding stricken victims safely to earth before flying off with a friendly wave. It seems that neither total nor totalitarian warfare can completely extinguish the human instinct of decency.
That said, we must face the fact that the Battle of the Atlantic was warfare at its most dreadful. Highly-trained submariners used the superlative technology of their ‘grey wolves’ to send thousands of civilian sailors to a ghastly death. When the tide turned, these same young men were killed in an equally horrible manner, and in roughly equal numbers. For what? Nothing changed. We can only salute the bravery of the seamen on both sides, deplore the psychotic old men who wasted their lives, sympathise with the grieving relatives, and admire those who displayed nobility at a time when it won no applause.
The U-boat pens at La Rochelle
You are 18 years old in 1942 and have been called up into the German navy. You are told that you are to serve in the U-boat command under Admiral Doenitz. You feel excited and probably a bit awed: the U-boat crews were lionised as an elite.
You are not given a choice. Unlike the British and American system, German U-boat conscripts were not volunteers.
You are told about the wine, women and song on the Atlantic coast bases; you are told about the comradeship, the magnificent contribution of the U-boats to Germany’s war-effort, the privileges and awards which will come your way. You are not told about the risks.
Over 75 per cent of U-boat crew-members perished in World War II, a lethality rate only approached by members of RAF Bomber Command at 50 per cent.
With this in mind my friends Euan and Pascal and I approached the U-boat pens at La Pallice in La Rochelle with mixed feelings. This vast construction, one of five on the Atlantic coast of France, had defeated all efforts by the RAF to destroy the protection it gave to its 10 submarines. The pens were seen as wasps’-nests and the RAF mounted increasingly intensive raids, with increasingly powerful munitions, in an attempt to strangle the U-boats at the point where they returned for repair and re-provisioning.
It didn’t work. La Rochelle (and Brest, Lorient, St Nazaire and Bordeaux) were plastered with high-explosive bombs month after month. The cities were badly damaged but the U-boat pens suffered hardly a scratch. They were designed and built by the Todt Organisation to be indestructible. So they were, and they are still there to this day.
As we walked up to the pens through the present-day dockyard the true scale of the construction dawned on us. It was like approaching the Great Pyramid: from a distance there was nothing to tell you how vast, how gargantuan the reality would be when you stood next to it.
The first thing to hit us was the smell. A combination of oil, fuel, rust and decomposition. Next was the sheer bulk of this massive edifice: thick walls of concrete, 30 metres high, as if someone had made a model on a desk and said: ‘Build that’. Which was exactly what Albert Speer did when he took over the Todt Organisation. We marvelled at how the labour could have been recruited and managed. Was it slaves?
History has wrongly attributed the construction of the pyramids to slavery, thanks to the credulity of Herodotus. They were, in fact, built by volunteers – skilled masons – who deemed it an honour to serve their King’s immortality. In a different way, so it was with the U-boat pens and the entire Atlantic Wall: most of the work was done by craftsmen who were paid more than they could have earned in civilian life. There were indeed slaves – a normal part of any Third Reich construction project – but in the case of the Atlantic fortifications and the U-boat pens they were a minority.
We walked round the perimeter of this huge, concrete castle and then through the dark central access tunnel, 10 metres high, which enabled German lorries to bring torpedoes, shells, new engines and replacement parts to the U-boats floating in their bays under 20 metres of concrete protection. The air was dank; sounds were muffled by the thickness of the concrete walls, just as they must have been 70 years ago. We walked out onto the jetty which protruded from the centre of the covered bays; this was where the bands played and the young girls threw flowers to encourage the crews on their way out into the Atlantic and to congratulate the lucky ones who came back flying the skull-and-crossbones at their masthead.
In 1941 most of them enjoyed the flowers, champagne and wild nights at La Rochelle’s boites de nuit. In 1943 few did. By 1944 so may U-boats had been sunk at sea by allied air attack that hardly any did: overall, 793 U-boats and their crews failed to return. Doenitz called off the Atlantic campaign.
The impression made on us by the La Rochelle U-boat pens was sinister: they look sinister, they had a sinister purpose, they accounted for innumerable human lives in both their construction and their operation. They stand there to this day as indestructible monuments to the megalomania of the Third Reich.
The U-boat campaign was the only threat in the Second World War to seriously worry Churchill. If it hadn’t been for radar the allies could have lost the war; it was airborne radar which sounded the U-boats’ death-knell.
The allies learnt how to eradicate the U-boat menace at sea, but could never touch them in their French bases. Which is why the pens at La Rochelle, still standing and with their camouflage paint intact, silent today but redolent with the clang and clatter of their busy activity in 1942, send a shiver up one’s spine.
We thought with sympathy about the feelings of the U-boat conscripts. What did they think when they stood, as we stood, on the embarkation jetty? Did they suspect their fate – the fate of most of them – trapped in a cramped metal tube which would be crushed by pressure as it sank into the depths after bombing by allied aircraft? We hoped not: ally or adversary, we hoped these young men would only be thinking of the good times they had in La Rochelle... wein, weib und gesang.
The Assassination of Heydrich
If you are British there are two things you know about the Czechs and World War II: Munich and Heydrich. Chamberlain’s performance at Munich (and in Berlin) was a source of embarrassment, then and now. A municipal bureaucrat elevated somehow to the world stage, he was no statesman. Churchill called him a ‘pinhead’. Hitler said: ‘If I ever see that man again I will jump on his stomach’.
Someone Hitler did like was Reinhard Heydrich, the falsetto-voiced, feminine-hipped leader of the RHSA. If ever there was a living embodiment of Nazism in all its grisly horror, Heydrich was it. Next year is the 70th anniversary of his demise, so Euan and I decided to visit the locations most closely associated with his short but infamous reign as Bohemia and Moravia’s ‘Protector’.
We began with his house in Panenske Brezany. It’s still there, as are the gates out of which his Mercedes swung on that fateful day in 1942. One of his sons, killed in a road accident outside the house, is buried in the garden. The house is large but not grand – by no means the most impressive residence in Panenske Brezany. An odd choice for such a conceited man.
We followed his route, as best we could, towards Prague and Hradcany, where he intended to finish up a few administrative matters before flying to Berlin the next morning. We identified the wood where the parachutists watched his daily movements and where they initially intended to set up an ambush; this idea was abandoned because there were too many SS in the immediate area.
It is possible to locate the exact spot where the assassination took place. Although the road layout has changed somewhat (to ease the sharp curve where the parachutists made their move), there are buildings nearby which are still identical to their appearance in contemporary photographs, and the information board next to the memorial explains exactly where it all happened. We re-traced the steps of Gabcik as he ran, pursued by Heydrich’s driver, and tried to flee through the rear exit of a butcher’s shop. But there was no rear exit: Gabcik burst out of the front door again, shot the driver in the leg and then raced down the hill towards the city centre.
Next, the Karel Boromejsky Church, where the parachutists met their end after putting up an incredibly brave fight – surrounded, trapped, they fought until their ammunition ran out. The last bullets they kept for themselves. There was no real hope of escape, and there never had been.
Meanwhile the Germans began slaughtering thousands of Czechs in retribution. It didn’t really matter if these people had any connection with the assassination or not, but for those who did their captors reserved the most imaginative methods of torture. Executions took place in Mauthausen, Plotzensee, Pardubice... Lidice and its population were obliterated, Lezaky was left standing but its inhabitants were murdered (all except two children).
Our last stop on this tour, no longer triumphal but heartbreaking, was the Kobylisy shooting-ground, where over 500 Czechs were killed by firing-squads in the months following the assassination.
The execution site is a series of rectangular plots surrounded by embankments. It is easy to see exactly what happened: the men and women, some as young as 15, and many complete families, were brought in trucks to the entrance, marched into the designated rectangle, lined up and shot: no doubt methodically and in an orderly manner. Their bodies were then loaded up and taken away for incineration. We felt certain that these people would have met their fates nobly; they were dying for their country, literally. There are German accounts of the dignity they displayed. The names of the victims are recorded on a memorial giving the dates and the times of their deaths.
The planners of the assassination knew exactly what would happen afterwards. Disproportionate retaliation was a key principle in the Nazis’ domination of Europe, and Heydrich was both an author and an arch-exponent of the technique. No-one outside his close circle knew at the time that he intended to liquidate or re-settle (ie liquidate) the majority of Czechs after the war. It would be hard to think of any moral, ethical or political argument against the extinction of this ghastly man.
People argue today about whether or not the price paid was worth it. History records that the assassination of Heydrich gave the Nazi hierarchy its first real fright. It also endowed the Czech nation with heroic status among the Allies: the government in exile was recognised soon afterwards. But was it worth it? Only the thousands who lost their lives in the aftermath have a right to answer that question.
