[Militant, No. 1185, 10 June 1994, p 8 and 9]
Despite saturation coverage, none of the TV programmes have fully analysed what really lay behind the D-Day landings. Lynn Walsh, editor of Militant International Review, explains:
Scoundrels in the theme-park
The Tories made a big mistake when they tried to use the D-Day anniversary to boost their vanishing support. The war-time generation has not forgotten that the Normandy landings claimed tens of thousands of lives and casualties.
All the veterans‘ organisations rejected Major’s cynical attempt to turn D-Day into tacky theme-park history, desperately trying to link his government with past victories . Even the Tory Spectator magazine denounced this „clear case of scoundrels seeking a last refuge in patriotism.“
Over 400,000 British service personnel and civilians lost their lives during world war two and many more suffered permanent injuries. Workers experienced over five years of exhaustion, shortages and fear. Lives were turned upside down.
Even in this most violent century, world war two was the most far-reaching, cataclysmic conflict. claiming the lives of over 55 million people. Europe and Asia were torn apart. Throughout the colonial lands, exploited peoples were forced to pay even more tribute to the warring imperialist powers, in footsoldiers, food and materials.
According to the official mythology, this was a war of liberal democracies against fascist tyrannies, of good nations (Britain , France, the US. the Allies) against evil nations (Germany, Italy, Japan, the so-called Axis). But such a phenomenon, involving the life-and-death struggle of immense social and economic, national and class forces, cannot be explained in terms of simple, black-and-white moral opposites.
Underlying the Allied/Axis conflict was the desperate drive by the major powers to escape from the deep-rooted, world-wide crisis in the capitalist system. World war two was in many ways a re-opening of world war one (1914-18), which despite claiming ten million lives solved nothing.
The peace brought economic depression and intense rivalry between the capitalist nation-states.
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Europe was convulsed by revolutionary uprisings and fascist anti-revolutions. The failure of the working class to replace a diseased capitalism with a democratic socialist society and international planning made renewed war inevitable.
But world war two had two added dimensions. One was the new antagonism between the capitalist states (Allies and Axis) and the Soviet Union. Stalin had crushed workers‘ democracy and imposed a dictatorship with many similarities to Hitler’s state.
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But the capitalists still feared the Soviet Union’s non-capitalist, planned economy which at that time was growing much faster than the market economies. The other new dimension was the struggle between the United States and Japan.
The US, now the dominant Western power, was determined to open up all the old colonial empires (British, French, Belgian, etc.) to US trade and investment. Japan, Asia ’s biggest industrial state, was striving to set up a new colonial empire of its own in Asia.
While world war one was a European war, world war two was a global war.
World war two was also a war of science, technology and mass production, which were applied, as never before to mass destruction. There were no hiding places for civilian populations. Production-line methods found their most fiendish form in the death camps set up by the Nazis – the most barbaric defenders of big business – for the ’scientific‘ extermination of millions of Jewish people.
For liberty and democracy?
“The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you,“ General Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, told the D-Day troops. This antifascist, fight-for-democracy theme dominated the anniversary. Like all myths this is part truth, part fairy story.
True, most working people in Britain and the USA saw the war as a just war to smash fascist dictatorship. They were ready to sacrifice the „blood, toil, tears and sweat“ demanded by Churchill . But many suspected the real motives of the Tory leaders, big business, and the military commanders, and with good reason.
Any claim that Britain’s rulers opposed fascism on principle or for deep moral reasons, is false. This is clear from the views of British capitalisms supreme war-time leader. Winston Churchill.
Churchill is now portrayed as a great champion of democracy. But until he came to the conclusion that Hitler was a threat to the Empire. the source of Great Britain ’s wealth. power and prestige, Churchill had no problem with fascist dictatorships. This may seem surprising.
His eloquent denunciations of Nazi tyranny and hymns to democracy are frequently quoted. But his record tells a different story.
After Mussolini established his fascist dictatorship in Italy, crushing the working class, Churchill told the Duce: „If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.“
This was in 1926, the year Churchill lead the Tory government’s offensive to smash the general strike.
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Churchill sympathised with Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and approved Japanese imperialism’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 – the real opening of world war two in Asia.
Freedom’s champion supported Franco’s fascist regime in Spain, defending Britain’s „non-intervention policy“ . This blocked arms going to the Republican side, while Hitler and Mussolini were free to arm Franco – whose victory enormously strengthened Hitler.
At home, Churchill advocated anti-democratic, anti-working class policies. When the 1929-31 slump threw millions out of work, Churchill demanded an end to workers‘ right to the dole. „There is,“ he proclaimed, „a small proportion (of the unemployed) for whom some disciplinary control in labour colonies might well be appropriate …“
Churchill opposed giving the vote to women in 1927, and called for dilution of one-man-one-vote by giving extra votes to ‚responsible‘ householders.
In 1934 he warned that in the next general election popular discontent might result in „a majority of inexperienced and violent men,“ with the result that “the responsible elements in the country will lose all control both of the House of Commons and of the executive“.
No wonder Churchill ’s initial appraisal of Hitler was quite favourable! When the fascists seized power in 1933 he dismissed the idea that it would mean war. Hitler, he said , had „risen to power by employing stern, grim, wicked, and even frightful methods“ but he might turn out to be one of the „great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind.“
Churchill shared the prevailing attitude of the British ruling class, summed up by an eminent historian, H. A. L. Fisher, in 1936: „The Hitler revolution is a sufficient guarantee that Russian communism will not spread westward. The solid German bourgeois hold the central fortress of Europe.“ The Tories were not worried about Hitler’s repressive policies at home. only about the threat to British capitalism’s colonies. markets, and strategic power.
The only difference between Churchill and most Tories (like Chamberlain , Halifax, etc.) was that he was quicker to see the international logic of Hitler’s policies.
Unfortunately for the other capitalist powers, Hitler was not a „solid bourgeois“ . Defeat in world war one, massive war debts, hyper-inflation, and revolutionary uprisings of the workers had shattered the German ruling class. After mobilising the frenzied middle class to pulverise the workers‘ organisations and seize state power, Hitler was not under the control of the capitalists.
He had his own solution to the insoluble social crisis. He was ready to take the struggle for „German (capitalist) supremacy“ and „living space“ (colonies to the East) to its ultimate conclusion, regardless of the cost to the capitalists.
Inevitably, Hitler’s war economy, military preparations and strategic manoeuvres meant war with British and US imperialism and with the Soviet Union. Tory prime minister Chamberlain acquiesced to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia returning from Munich bearing „Peace with Honour“.
Churchill saw a little further: “The government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame and they will get war too.
The reality behind “a dangerous business“
Another myth, revived on the 50th anniversary, is that the D-Day landings, ‚Overlord‘, was the operation which won the war. Again, the reality Is different.
Before the Allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches in June 1944, the Soviet army had broken the back of the Nazi war machine. The battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and the Soviet offensives during 1943-4 were the real turning point of world war two in Europe.
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Britain and the US dropped their former hostility to the Soviet Union and made an alliance of convenience with Stalin. They were quite ready to let the Soviet forces and workers expend their energy and blood fighting the Nazis.
The Western powers‘ cynical calculation was revealed in 1941 by the US vice-president, Truman , who declared: „If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.“ (New York Times 24 June 1941)
In the event, the Allies had to rely on the resources of the Soviet Union. Nazi atrocities in the occupied areas, especially in Poland, the Baltic states and the Ukraine, where both the Jews and „inferior Slavic races“ were massacred, provoked an epic resistance to fascism. This was in spite of Stalin’s dictatorship, which in some areas rivalled Hitler’s repression.
Workers in the USSR were defending the socialist legacy of the October 1917 Revolution, while Stalin conducted the war on nationalistic, Russian-patriotic lines, which could not appeal to German troops and workers under the fascist heel. The enormous resilience of the planned economy was a decisive factor in the USSR’s survival – and the Allies‘ victory. This was an irony of history, given the western capitalists‘ deep hatred towards socialised production.
The price paid by the Soviet people is unimaginable. Soviet forces suffered about twenty times the combined British and US losses on all fronts, while inflicting three-quarters of all German casualties. Altogether, about 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died, almost half the total world war two fatalities.
For over three years the Allied leaders, Churchill especially, rejected Stalin’s call for a „second front“ in the West to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union . Conditions for a landing in France were probably as favourable in 1943 as in 1944. The alternative strategy, the invasion of Italy in 1943 and intensive bombing of German cities, did not succeed in breaking the Nazi war-machine.
Some Western leaders became more and more alarmed at Britain ’s cautious , pin-prick tactics. If the Russians do all the fighting, warned President Roosevelt’s advisor, Stimson in 1943: „I think that will be a dangerous business for us at the end of the war.“
The British-US leaders miscalculated . By Spring 1944 they were afraid that the Soviet forces could occupy Berlin, Budapest. Prague, even Vienna, and perhaps Paris before the Allied forces arrived . A landing in France could be delayed no longer. After D-Day, the Allies‘ aim was, of course, to defeat Hitler totally but also to restore capitalist order on the lines favoured by the US, now the world ’s decisive super-power.
In Italy, the US-British commanders were already striving to disarm the popular resistance movement, which overthrew Mussolini and was overwhelmingly anti-capitalist. After Normandy, the Allied commanders also moved to disarm the Communist-led French resistance. They would rather bomb the retreating German forces, claiming the lives of another 10,000 French civilians, than collaborate with the mass resistance movement. Moreover, the Allies‘ demand for Germany’s „unconditional surrender“ solidified a beleaguered people behind Hitler. Nothing was offered to any potential anti -fascist opposition in Germany, and this delayed the end.
Crimes and misdemeanours
When the fighting was over, the victorious Allies held the Nuremberg show trials, offloading all the blame and war-guilt onto the Nazi war criminals. Their crimes were undoubtedly among the worst in human history and on a barbarous scale.
Yet the allies‘ long silence, prior to the liberation of Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps, was passed over. Nearly half of those convicted escaped with their lives. Hitler’s rocket scientists and some of his Gestapo spies were spirited away to work for the US government. Many other Nazis rapidly re-established themselves as business and political leaders in the remodelled, pro-American German capitalism.
The Nazi leaders were tried as evil beasts, and there was no attempt to uncover the causes of fascism. a malignancy arising from the diseased tissue of capitalism.
Nor was there any attempt, at that time, to reveal the atrocities committed by Stalin’s regime. That came later, when the Allies , having come to terms with Germany and Japan. engaged in the ‚cold war‘ with their former Soviet ally.
Nor was there any examination of any of those on the Allied side responsible for grotesquely inhuman decisions – the fire-bombing of Dresden, when the German war-machine was already broken and the decision , when Japan was already ready to surrender, of atomic bombs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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