This is for those who might be a bit confused about the Second World War in Europe. Maps and military movements with lots of flags and sound effects. Click to advance.   

The War to End All Wars, or the Great War, or, as we call it today, the First World War, came to an end precisely at 11am on 11 November of 1918. Till that moment, the fighting still continued, so many people were actually killed on a day when they knew in advance the war was going to end, and who was the victor. (Among the dead in these very last days of the war was one of the greatest poets of the time, Wilfred Owen.)

Similarly, there was the Second World War, the Korean War, and others where the killing and dying went up to the last possible minute, even though it was known in advance that the war was going to end, and who (if anybody) was going to win.

What is more tragic, then - a death in the thick of the fighting, when everything hangs in the balance, even if the ultimate outcome is the defeat of your side? Or is it a death in the last gasp of a war, with the end result certain, whether you are on the winning side or not? Who would "willingly" (assume it ever happens willingly) "lay down his life" (gag) under those circumstances?

A million deaths are a statistic, yes, but each death in the last moment of a war is kind of a farce.

I have this theory: again and again in the course of history, nations have gone into gratuitous wars that had nothing to do with them because of a kind of collective death wish.

I am talking about joining in wars which had no possible relevance to them, and which - whether their side won or the other - would be so ruinous that they would end up losing anyway.

Think about Turkey in World War One, for instance, which joined the Central Powers even though the war in Flanders or Russia had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Turkey was so primitive it didn't even have horse-drawn fire engines; it had no functional navy, no air force at all, and even had to import German generals (like Generalleutnant Otto Liman von Sanders) to command its armies, which were comprised of different disaffected minorities and could not be counted on to stand and fight unless the troops were ethnic Anatolian Turks. The Germans even tried to refuse the Ottoman offer of alliance, but the Turks insisted on joining in a war that could not but end in the fractious sub-nationalities revolting and pulling the empire apart - whichever side won.

Think about Italy in the Second World War, the fascist Italy of Mussolini with its biplane air force, its tanks that couldn't withstand anything more than machine gun fire, its navy without radar, its soldiers who surrendered in masses at the first available opportunity. Hitler never forced Mussolini to join in on his side; Benito did it on his own, and turned out to be a positive encumbrance, a liability for the Nazis. The East African colonies of Italy couldn't even be defended and would be speedily lost; anyone could see that. But Mussolini didn't seem to. He even started an invasion of neutral Greece. Hitler had to rush troops to Africa and greece to bail him out, and even those failed, in the end.

Think about Britain today. OK, Britain is different in that it has systematically surrendered all vestiges of its independence to the US over the last few decades; but nobody actually put a gun to Tony Blair's head and ordered him to send troops to help in the illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK sat out the invasion of Vietnam and there was little Bush could have done to force Blair to join in on Iraq - but Blair didn't hesitate, not for a second. Check the Downing Street Memo. Now that Britain's last few troops in Iraq cower in fortified bases while militias control Basra, I don't exactly think anyone can seriously say London has gained by this...even if Bush had won in Iraq, I don't see how Britain would have gained a thing.

So, back to my theory. Assuming that the leaders of those countries weren't raving lunatics, and there is no evidence that any of them was, it may be that a time comes when everything seems so set to go belly up that a war that will in any case smash everything may come as a godsend, a way to destroy the established order and begin all over again. And of course it's a wonderful way  to divert people's attention, even if for a short while.

It's the ultimate circus of the ultimate Bread and Circuses - only soon enough it means the end of both bread and circuses. Ask Benito's ghost, or Enver Pasha's.

 

Haven’t you come across this, again and again and again?

“______________ is the greatest country in the world!” proudly proclaim the citizens (of the “greatest country” – whichever it is). It’s not a matter open for debate, at least where the citizens of that country are concerned.

Personally, having come across this ad nauseam in Hollywood and Bollywood, I don’t let it register on my consciousness – except to wonder to what extent it allows the proponents of the “greatest country” hypothesis to do whatever is necessary to brainwash the people into backing all the wrong policies. Remember Nazi Germany?

In my opinion, the very act of being a nation state imposes so many compromises and deviations from the original ideals, if any, of a nation, that you can’t ever call a country “great” and mean it.

What makes a country great? Land area? No, that only means that the nation has been successful in invading and subjugating or destroying the maximum number of other people. Wealth? It only means that the people have been most efficient in sucking the money out of poorer countries and peoples, and probably pollutes more than ten other nations put together.

Principles? That’s a laugh. What principles? Look at the United States, where all men were allegedly created equal, but which even at its birth didn’t have any rights left over to give the Native Americans and the self-reproducing, self-replicating animated black farm machinery. Look at China, which shovels villagers off their land to make factories to serve the most decadent streams of conspicuous consumption and still pretends to be Communist. I wonder what Mao would have thought of that? And I don’t even want to start in on India, because I would never stop.

Maybe there were great civilisations, but I doubt even that. Think of the Greek civilisation – you picture the hoplites and the philosophers, but what of the slaves toiling in the mines? Rome was all very grand with the Senate and the legions – remember the gladiators fighting in the arena for public amusement, the vomitaria for throwing up so one could stuff oneself even more full at parties? The Aztecs with their human sacrifices? China with its eunuchs and famines? Ancient India with its blood-soaked battles and its caste system? We don’t know too much about the ancient Babylonians or enough about the Egyptians (or at least I don’t) but I scarcely think they would come off any better than that…

We’re all scum, and always were. Come to think of it, openly admitting the fact would likely improve understanding between nations.

  

   

    

Among the more bizarre things that went on in the name of various of the less savoury religions was the sacrifice of virgin women...like the Inca girl in the photo.

Why virgin women? Why did they ceremoniously take young women who had never had intercourse and rip their hearts out with stone knives after consecrating them to the gods, and so on?

Are the speculations here valid, which imply that a virgin was unattached and hence a suitable victim?

Or, as I think, was it because they represented unfulfilled fertility, life yet to come (and those were times when children in large numbers were important, life being short and brutish and nasty) - so sacrificing them was an actual, major, sacrifice for the society at large, part of its future?

(Naturally, then, if I'm right, it had to be women. Even one man is enough to impregnate thousands of women - as Chingis Khan's surviving descendants so amply prove.)

Or was it that they just did not like virgins?

Again, boys and girls - get rid of your cherries before it's too late. What with the fundamentalist religious tide sweeping the world, don't say you haven't been warned. It might be knife time again.

 

Did you think Myra Hindley or Ilse Koch the ultimate in female psychopathic murderers?

Try again.

Back in the sixteenth century, in Hungary, there was a Countess Elizabeth Báthory. She lived in a castle at Čachtice, Hungary, and in the years between 1585 and her arrest at the end of December 1610 is thought to have murdered from “several hundred” up to 650 young girls and women, whom she enticed into her castle on the excuse of employment. Some of the methods she used to kill them were, according to witnesses,

• severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death.
• burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia.
• biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts.
• freezing to death.
• starving of victims.

Why did she do all this? She wasn’t stupid or dumb – she ran the castle and its estates in the stead of her husband, who was off fighting the Turks, and she was literate in four languages. She wasn’t casually venting her boredom by killing young women for fun, either. So why?

Apart from simple sadism, she was rumoured to have bathed in the blood of her victims to renew her youth – virgin’s blood being a rejuvenator par excellence, it appears. So listen to me, boys and girls – it’s not wise to be cherry. Pay heed.

After her arrest, which followed years of accusations and rumours, she was never brought to trial – although three of her accomplices were tortured to death and one was sentenced to life imprisonment. She spent the rest of her life, four years, in her castle under house arrest. It's said she was walled up in a single room with no access to the world but a slit for food or water, but I somehow doubt that. Given what she was allowed to get away with, I'm sure the circumstances of her imprisonment would have been somewhat less uncomfortable.

I guess it’s always paid to be stinking rich. Even more then than now.    

    

In yesterday’s paper I read that Nuon Chea (“Brother Number Two”) of the Khmer Rouge is finally to stand trial for war crimes. Coincidentally (I assume) a few days back they were showing that old favourite of mine, The Killing Fields, on HBO – though they did edit out the iconic scene of Dith Phran (played by Haing Ngor) stumbling upon a carpet of human bones in the paddies…maybe to protect the tender sensibilities of kiddies who gorge themselves on cartoon violence every day.

I’m, in most things, far left wing in my political views – and I think the Khmer Rouge was the worst disaster ever to affect the left movement anywhere. Let me try and explain why.

There have been a lot of previous disasters in the left; Stalin is one example, but he was far from the unmitigated disaster most people like to pretend he was. He did guide the USSR from the wooden plough age to the age of nuclear reactors; and during that time he got the country through a devastating civil war, economic collapse, and even more devastating world war, and a Cold War he neither instigated nor wanted. That’s not exactly peanuts. Also, Stalin was far from a pure left wing dictator; in his methods he was much more a fascist nationalist than a leftist.

Mao Zedong, in his later years, also set himself up as a demigod; but in his earlier years, when he would debate and engage with his peers, he was very far from the personality cultist he is thought of as these days. Most of his real accomplishments – the civil war, the Long March, agrarian reforms, the uniting of the country behind his movement, the anti-Japanese war (in which the ‘official’ Chinese government of Chiang Kai Shek did nothing at all) – all these date back to those early years. Mao also realised something which he never tired of trying to drum into the heads of his imitators, something which I call the essence of Maoism: one should not try to replicate the Chinese blueprint in other countries, because the conditions in each nation are different. Mao himself applied this in his own struggle. The Chinese Communist party, in following the Russian imposed model, was on the verge of collapse when Mao took over the reins and (in direct opposition to conventional Marxist theory, which stressed on the urban worker as the vehicle of revolution) turned to the peasantry. We all know what happened then.

As long as you keep the goal of egalitarianism in sight, find your own way to it: that is the real message of Mao.

Now, back to the Khmer Rouge. In my ever un-humble opinion, the Khmer Rouge is the Taliban of the left. Just as the Taliban, by its excesses, has tainted every Islamic movement anywhere in the world (even when those movements have no relationship to the Taliban and are engaged in legitimate struggles, the anti-Zionist fight for instance, like Hizbollah in Lebanon) and turned the world against them, every Maoist movement has to bear the cross of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields of Cambodia. Bush recently, for instance, claimed that to withdraw from Iraq would lead to a Cambodia like situation, one of the stupider comments to come from a not very intelligent individual with no knowledge of history.

There are many other parallels between the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban.

Just as the Taliban were born out of American interference in Afghanistan, the Khmer Rouge was born of American interference in Cambodia, when it helped overthrow the government of Norodom Sihanouk and imposed the corrupt Lon Nol, when it illegally bombed and invaded the country and rendered it waste.

Just as the Taliban enjoyed initial strong American support, the Khmer Rouge was supported by the US and its Thai satellite after the Vietnamese ousted it from power, almost up to its final 1998 disintegration and surrender. The Thai regime sheltered it; the Americans gave it diplomatic recognition and allowed it to occupy the Cambodian seat at the UN. (This also kind of raises an interesting point: do US governments, and their allies, like to support regimes that would theoretically be of the extreme opposite to US-professed values, against relatively more moderate and liberal regimes? Remember American support for the Taliban, the Saudi Arabians, the Afghan warlords, and consistent American opposition to such relatively liberal Muslim states as Najib’s Afghanistan, Syria and Ba’athist Iraq. Contrast American support for the Khmer Rouge to its long standing sanctions regime against the much less extreme Vietnamese Communists. Remember that Hamas was initially promoted by the Zionist regime of “Israel” as a counter to the secular Fatah.)

There are other points of similarity. Both the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge were welcomed with open arms by a citizenry weary of war and rampant corruption; both made themselves speedily hated by their actions – I admit the Taliban couldn’t hold a candle in that respect to the Khmer Rouge, which set out to alienate the people of Phnom Penh in one single day.

And let’s not lose sight of one crucial point: whatever one thinks of them, both the Taliban and the Khmer Rouge were led by people who were both personally incorruptible and thought they knew what was best for the people. This fact has to be kept in mind if one is going to look for an explanation of either regime; otherwise one is at a loss to explain why anyone would try to do such apparently nonsensical things. At the ground level Taliban soldiers were often corrupt, and I’ve no doubt that there were a lot of corrupt Khmer Rouge as well; but just as Mullah Omar was on a holy war against corruption of Islam and western contamination, not to mention banditry, rapine and warlordism, Pol Pot (Saloth Sar if one is to give him his real name), Khieu Samphan and the rest of the Angka Leou (the Khmer Rouge High Command) were radicals, sure, but none of them were actuated by any love of luxury or personal acquisitiveness. They thought, bizarre as it sounds, that by putting anyone with spectacles or dental fillings in labour camps and by emptying the cities they were actually purifying society of the curse of intellectualism. The Taliban didn’t put women in shuttlecock burqas and ban girls’ education just to be cussed; they thought they were imposing pure Islam. The Khmer Rouge actually thought that forcing schoolteachers to grow rice and lawyers to take care of cows was creating a pure Marxist society. That by these standards Karl Marx himself would have ended up in their camps didn’t seem to strike anyone, or if it did they ignored it. Irony being dead, as we all know.

As an aside: doesn’t it strike you that revolutionary leaders, anywhere, have got to be humourless? A sense of humour and revolution don’t seem to go together somehow. Any exceptions come to mind?

So, the personally honest and utterly blinkered leaders of both movements not only destroyed what they set out to create but contaminated others, utterly unconnected with them, because these others were tarred by the same brush. The US, India, and others backed Nepal’s horrible royal regime against the Maoist rebels who were trying to bring in some kind of egalitarianism to the country, citing, among other things, the Khmer Rouge’s record. Similarly, any Muslim rebellion against oppression (as in Occupied Palestine) is crushed on the pretext of fighting Talibanic values, in the form of Al Qaeda.

This is why I’d love to see the Khmer Rouge leaders hanged by their ears. Not just because of what they did to Cambodia, but what they did to the leftist fight against imperialism, worldwide.

And I’m sure plenty of Muslims would love to see that happen to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden as well.

    

Sometimes it's better not to know too much...
I've always been fascinated by the Third Reich, most so of the story of the last month of its existence, with the Red Army threatening Berlin, the Western Allies smashing their way through the Ruhr, Germany almost cut in two, and Hitler hiding in his Fuehrerbunker under the Reich Chancellery. So when this film was made and opened to good reviews I waited for it eagerly, and I finally found a copy of the DVD in Delhi and bought it. Watched it last night.
Man, what a turkey.
First things first. If you want to make a historical movie, for dog's sake, keep it true to history. Or it will appeal only to those who prefer drama and invented "facts" to reality - and going by all appearances there are far too many of that.
What should I say about this film? It purports to depict the last twelve days in the Bunker, from Hitler's birthday on April 20th to the final exodus from the Bunker on May 2, two days after his suicide. I say "purports", because it does nothing of the sort.
Anyone who's read Shirer or Trevor Roper on Hitler will never be able to reconcile knowledge with depictions here. I won't really bother to give too much away - go see it for yourself if you must. But I'll say this much:
They play merry hell with timelines and logic, with the surrender of the city PRECEDING the final exodus and heavy fighting (how on earth?)
The film invents things, like Goebbels and his wife shooting each other (they were shot - at their request - by SS guards).
Total nonentities like Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, and Eva Braun are turned into super-important characters while the single most important man in the Bunker in the last days (after Hitler himself), Martin Bormann, is about as important as an item of furniture. Braun, in reality a brainless Hitler devotee, becomes a discerning, sensitive woman who tries to save her brother in law from Hitler's wrath (in reality she bluntly refused to help). Magda Goebbels' alleged personal poisoning of her children (since they all died, there's no way of knowing just who poisoned the kids) occupies at least ten minutes of screen time - all to no value. Etc.
The film dramatises incidents out of all proportion, like the capture of the brother in law (SS Gruppenfuehrer Hermann Fegelein) who was discovered in his own house in civilian clothes and on Hitler's orders quietly shot in the Chancellery garden. In the film he's discovered naked in bed with a woman, boozed out of his mind. Even Hitler's funeral is fictionalised beyond recognition.
And so on. If I were to write an account of every fictionalisation, dramatisation, and plain fabrication in the film, I would end up writing pages, and this film isn't worth it. Not at all.
I'm awarding it two stars, and the film is worth zero. I'm awarding the two stars ONLY because of Bruno Ganz' performance as Hitler. He's worth more than the rest of the film's cast put together, dragging leg, trembling hand, and all.
Many years ago, I watched a TV film called THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER. That was so much better I'd have loved to see it again.
As for this one, they should have burned it along with Hitler's body.

Among the more bizarre of the tendencies of Indians is the insistence on declaring that we’ve won all of our many wars since Independence; or at least all the wars against Pakistan.

 

Let’s take a look at these “victories.”

 

In 1947, on paper, we started off with all of the state of Jammu and Kashmir; the Maharaja of Kashmir signed over all of his state to India after Pakistani tribesmen invaded, not just the part left under his control. Yet when the fighting was over and a ceasefire signed, India was left with a shade over half the state. Is this a victory?

 

In 1961, we invaded the Portuguese colony of Goa and took it over within twenty four hours. The few Portuguese soldiers present, virtually unarmed and utterly isolated, laid down arms rather than offer suicidal resistance, yet the number of Indian casualties exceeded those of the Portuguese. I’d have liked to see how the Indian army of the time, malfunctioning radios, canvas gym shoes, World War One rifles and all, would have performed had the Portuguese put up serious resistance.

 

In 1962, following years of confrontation along the Himalayas, India sent a force into Chinese occupied territory (the Thag La ridge and Khinzemane) and unilaterally shifted the border northwards. The Chinese, who were waiting for some such provocation, invaded and in exactly a month captured all the territory they claimed. The Indian Army did not manage even to disrupt the Chinese timetable, let alone offer serious resistance. But to this day, although India can’t exactly pretend that it didn’t lose, it tries to save face by saying the Chinese did not advance further because of the strong Indian forces arrayed against them. Duh. Of course they didn’t advance any further – they had already achieved all their objectives. Why on earth would they want to advance any further?  

 

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought over the Rann of Kutch – a swampy marshland – in the state of Gujarat. Indian troops, by and large, dropped their weapons, food, everything, and ran away, so that the Pakistanis didn’t even have any logistical problems – they ate Indian food and shot at Indian soldiers with captured Indian bullets. Not surprisingly, this little battle is not even mentioned in popular Indian history.

 

Later the same year, Pakistan sent saboteurs and raiders into Kashmir, followed by troops across the ceasefire line (which is not an international boundary). In response, India invaded Pakistan, sending an armoured thrust towards Lahore. This thrust could not even capture Lahore, just across the international border, and almost undefended, because the Pakistanis simply blew up a bridge across the Icchhogil Canal. In the meantime, the Pakistani Air Force virtually shot the Indian Air Force from the skies (as even the Indian Air Force belatedly admitted in a book published last year) and the Indian Navy stayed bottled up in harbour to avoid the risk of politically harmful sinkings. And then, when Pakistan was well on the way to running out of ammunition, India negotiated a settlement and returned all captured territory. And we still claim this was a victory.

 

India invaded East Pakistan on November 22, 1971, and after a brief campaign captured the territory (which nowadays is Bangladesh). On the ground, a military victory, because the Pakistani troops, demoralised and without air cover, were more keen on trying to save their skins than in fighting back. Fine. But – what did it achieve? We now had freed Pakistan of a genuine albatross round its neck, and given Pakistanis a new reason to hate India; we had inevitably pushed Pakistan towards Islamic radicalism; while Bangladesh, the new nation, began hating Indians and blaming India for its woes now that it no longer had the West Pakistanis to blame. Today Bangladesh is a more unstable and dangerous entity than East Pakistan had ever been.

 

Seen in a long term, is this a victory?

 

In 1987, India sent troops into Sri Lanka with the alleged agreement of the Sri Lankan government – alleged agreement, I say, because you could hear the Lankan sinews crack with all the arm twisting. That force, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, soon got stuck in a vicious guerrilla war against the Sri Lankan Tamil secessionist outfit, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and after two years had to withdraw with its tail firmly tucked between its legs. The casualties were so enormous they have to this day never officially been divulged.  No wonder that this is another little war we studiously try and ignore.      

 

In 1999, India fought an alleged war against Pakistan over Kargil in Kashmir. Normal diplomatic relations continued between the nations and the international borders were perfectly quiet, and it was basically a fight between a relatively small number of Pakistani soldiers on hilltops and in bunkers, supported by artillery but with no air cover, and a relatively very large number of Indian troops with artillery and aircraft. Even so, it was only after months of fighting that a negotiated settlement imposed by Washington brought the conflict to an end, and Pakistan still occupies an important mountain on the Indian side of the boundary. Again, I don’t know what sort of victory this is. At the very least, it made Washington a player in a bilateral dispute, a lever the Americans have never abandoned to this day.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t support or advocate military conquest. But it’s also evident – or should be, anyway – that false claim of victories are dangerous simply because they make the likelihood of military adventures greater. A country that has the moral courage to admit its ass was soundly kicked on the battlefield is unlikely to want to repeat the experience unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

 

Naturally, however, in a nation like India, this is not going to happen, because there are too many reputations to defend and hagiographies to write. And after we lose, whether militarily or politically, the next little warlet (full scale wars are of course no longer possible) we’ll go through the same little mix of amnesia and rewriting history.

 

And after that, the next one as well.    

The truth about Hiroshima.

One of the abiding mysteries of the age, to non-Indians, is why - just a short six decades after becoming independent from a colonial occupation that began with foreign traders setting up shop - we are busy giving away our economic and political freedom, apparently with our eyes wide open.

There is - to my mind - little that is inexplicable in this.

It's just a fact that we Indians have always been feudal, and therefore extremely amenable to being ruled by whoever holds the feudal power. Whether that power is wielded by slant-eyed Mongols from Central Asia or blond Britishers has never mattered much to us. It's the dispensation of patronage that we've cared for.

That of course goes with the fact that we're a nation of people driven primarily through self-interest, a true nation of compradors. I many be wrong in this, but I doubt it, when I say that if there was an Iraq-style invasion and occupation of this country you'd see no resistance movement whatever except by small, scattered Maoist groups. As far as the "mainstream" is concerned, once the main fighting is over, they'll all compete for the occupier's favour, and the neocon fantasy for Iraq would have come true here.

How, otherwise, could a hundred thousand or so Brits rule a nation of hundreds of millions for close to two hundred years?

You see, unlike many countries, we were handed our independence on a platter. Despite the official propaganda of the Indian "non-violent freedom movement", all said "movement" did was get everyone locked up at regular intervals. The Quit India Movement of 1942 was a classic example of this. All it did was lay the way open for the disintegration of the country on religious lines.

It was because of the economic devastation of Britain caused by the Second World War, and the coincident demise of conventional imperialism (which is beginning to make a comeback) that Britain, unable to cling on longer to its empire, left. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his Non-Violent Struggle had nothing to do with it. It was just used by the British as a useful safety valve, so more people did not take up the gun. Gandhi and his minions just took the credit for what was a natural historical process.

We had violent struggles for freedom, including plenty of martyrs - Bhagat Singh, Khudiram Bose, Jatin Das, Pa Togan Sangma, U Tirot Sing Syiem, and many others - but official historiography won't even mention them except in passing. Most of them, in any case, held strongly left wing and hence unsuitable views. Hell, even Subhash Chandra Bose (in picture) is no longer persona grata in Indian government circles - recently the government said it had no documentary evidence about his role in the freedom struggle.

Unlike countries like Algeria, Vietnam, the US, China, or even Eritrea, which won independence in brutal anti-colonial wars (or as a result of failed but significant anti-colonial struggles, like Indonesia, Malaysia or Kenya) we didn't have to fight for our freedom.

That, and the national comprador mentality, is why we're so eager to give it away now.

I've been reading , over the last several days, two different versions of the same episode - the end of the War in Europe in 1945. One is by the British historian H R Trevor-Roper. The other is by the American...uh...whatever...John Toland.

The interesting thing about this is the very, very different ways one can look at the same episode - and write about it. In one sense it's indicative of the differences between the American world-view of the period and that of the British.

HR Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler is a classic in any case, and one of my personal favourites. I was re-reading it; I'd already read it more than once.

Trevor-Roper, naturally, concentrates on the last days of Hitler's life - specifically, the last fortnight. He also does it thoroughly and in dry pedantic language, limiting himself to known facts, strictly avoiding personal speculation, and when something can only be conjectured he clearly mentions it as conjecture. He also writes with a dry humour, particular targets of his scorn being such Nazi "luminaries" as Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk (called a "ninny") and SS Brigadefuehrer Walther Schellenberg (called, in tones of devastating irony, "subtle").

Trevor-Roper isn't infallible by any means - he was among those who validated Konrad Kujau's forged Hitler Diaries in the 1980s, and for his own purposes he never could bring himself to admit the by now acknowledged fact that Hitler bit into a cyanide capsule as well as shot himself. But what he writes is always carefully sourced, never dramatised, and when he talks of dramatic scenes (which certainly weren't lacking in the Fuehrerbunker) he throws in a caustic aside or two about the likeliness or otherwise of those scenes having actually occurred in the manner described.

Trevor-Roper is unsparing in his scathing indictment of the Nazi leaders, whom he calls a "court". He spares none of them, not even Hitler's architect and Minister for Armaments Albert Speer, for whom he has an obvious soft corner. Speer is especially to be blamed, in Trevor-Roper's eyes, because he did not act till the last moment, when it was too late, despite being among the most intelligent members at court.

And - of course - Tervor-Roper writes history, not propaganda. He makes no attempt to describe the Allies or to make Cold War points. When he describes Russian shellfire, it's Russian shellfire, not a murderous Communist barrage on helpless German civilians.

All in all, a book of history, filled with dry humour and no unnecessary flourishes.

John Toland's The Last 100 Days is a very, very different kettle of fish.

Now, it’s true that unlike Trevor-Roper, who concentrates on the last fortnight of Hitler’s life with only reference to the past where relevant to throw light on the present, John Toland writes about the last hundred days of the war (why hundred? Don’t ask.) – from 27 January 1945 to the surrender to the USSR (Germany’s second surrender) on 8 May. Therefore, I do agree that it might be a bit unrealistic to compare the two all-in-all and one should concentrate on the segment of Toland’s book dealing with Hitler’s days in the Bunker. But even that is more than enough.

In the first place, the entire style of writing is entirely different. Unlike Trevor-Roper, who as I said was writing history and made no bones about it, Toland (like every single American historian I’ve read on the Second World War with the shining exception of the great William L. Shirer) writes not so much history as a novel. No real history has space for breathless prose describing the position of objects on tables, the gasps for breath of excited officers, the (described verbatim, as a dialogue) conversations of people, and so on. No history that pretends to be remotely objective goes out and out to bring in the most dramatic personal accounts and present them as fact. Even the dramatised accounts of such persons as Hanna Reitsch (which, as Trevor-Roper points out, have since been repudiated by Reitsch herself) get full play by Toland, reported as if someone was there with a movie camera and tape recorder (the technology of the day). But that’s typical of Toland’s style of writing, or in general of the American historiography of the period (again, of course, barring Shirer). While writing for the general reader, facts must never come in the way of a good story.

Less forgivable even is Toland’s categorisation of the entire Nazi hierarchy (except for those like Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner and so on, who are clearly beyond the pale) as decent men, earnest, cultured, learned, intent on making peace, let down by the indecision, cowardice, and theatrical evil of their superiors. The aforementioned Schwerin von Krosigk is in Toland’s world a decent, thoughtful man, a Rhodes Scholar given to intellectual thinking, not, as Trevor-Roper ruthlessly points out, a nitwit whose only achievement was political survival and whose intellectual standards are evident in his own diary, kept, as Trevor-Roper pointed out, to “show posterity what sort of German man was present in the hours of Germany’s steepest decline” (Schwerin von Krosigk’s own words). For example, when told about Roosevelt’s death, this is what Schwerin von Krosigk wrote: “This was the Angel of History! We all felt its wings rustle through the room.” Toland reports the incident but carefully avoids drawing the obvious conclusion.

Similar is the treatment of Walther Schellenberg, one of the most disgusting Nazis of all as far as I am concerned. This SS brigadier it was who said that it would be unexceptionable if all Jews could have been exterminated, but since only a third were under Nazi control, trying to kill them was a stupidity (something Trevor-Roper points out but Toland is careful to ignore). This is also the guy who kept on prodding Himmler to depose Hitler and take over the Reich, something which would have achieved absolutely nothing (something even Himmler realised) but which is presented by Toland as a great opportunity missed because of Himmler’s pusillanimity. Aforesaid pusillanimity described in detail, where Himmler puts his fist to his mouth and glances around as if haunted.

(Similar is the description of water from a spilled vase wetting Hitler’s corpse’s clothes, and Doenitz keeping a loaded gun in his drawer while telling Himmler he was dismissed, and other similar irrelevancies. Much of Toland is based on irrelevancies or on personal accounts unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.)

Good solid novel writing, but I ask you, is this history?

And while I am on this Schellenberg: while many of the Nazis openly talked about their crimes in the dock (some, like Rudolf Hoess, commander at Auschwitz – not to be confused with Rudolf Hess – with pride) it was Schellenberg who, in return for better treatment and reduced prison time (he ended up serving just two years or so) turned evidence and helped the prosecution at Nuremberg. I just wonder what little portion of his “evidence” was authentic. And this is the man who is the great peacemaker of Toland’s pages, the man who, as Trevor-Roper points out, did not have the simple intelligence to understand that Himmler was not ever, under any circumstances, going to be acceptable to the Allies as Fuehrer of a Germany sans Hitler.

Least forgivable of all, but by far the most explicable, is Toland’s treatment of the USSR. Both Toland and Trevor-Roper were writing during the Cold War, and Trevor-Roper’s revised book is roughly contemporaneous with Toland’s (1965). Trevor-Roper, again, was writing history. He has no direct ideological axe to grind except on the point of Hitler’s mode of committing suicide, which seems to be more of a personal point of pride more than anything. Toland, on the other hand, is a Cold Warrior and was writing a novel disguised as history. From his pages emerges a Soviet Union of drunken, savage barbarians whose troops rolled on Germany in an alcohol fuelled, bestial flood, intent only on murder and rapine, heroically resisted by small bands of brave German soldiers trying vainly to defend (the implication is always there – sometimes overt) Western civilisation (of course, by the sixties NATO was employing as many Nazis as it could lay its hands on, so it’s scarcely a surprise). No Soviet soldier or officer is presented as anything other than the Enemy; on the other hand, the quisling band of Vlasov and other turncoats are Toland’s heroes. Even the French and British – except for Churchill - come across as minimised, with a token mention of a British pilot or soldier here and there; the Americans are really the only Allies worth mentioning. I guess he was just prefiguring Hollywood’s rewriting of history as it goes on today.

The pity is, of course, that of those who have enough of an attention span left to go through these two books, it’s Toland who will be read and remembered, because of the novel-style of writing and because of the America-centred ambience of his book. Trevor-Roper’s effort is infinitely superior and much more famous, but it will be left unread on the shelves.

Odd thing: by the Korean War, we had the situation reversed in one respect: the American IF Stone wrote an infinitely better account – The Hidden History of the Korean War – than the Cold War rhetoric ridden account of the British writer David Rees (Korea - The Limited War). Naturally, Rees is considered to be an “authority” and IF Stone, er, “controversial”.

Fortunately, the Cold War is over, and we do have the Internet.

They can’t do a Toland unchallenged any more.