Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory
by Norman Davies
Macmillan £25, 456 pages
FT bookshop price: £20
Europe East And West
by Norman Davies
Jonathan Cape £20, 352 pages
FT bookshop price: £16
Eminent historians enjoy certain benefits denied to more obscure
scholars. They get asked to publish collections of their lectures and
musings. And they get commissioned to write big books on popular themes.
Norman Davies currently has an example of both genres on the market.
Europe East and West is a collection of essays. And Europe at War -
available at all good airports - is a new history of the second world
war.
Davies deserves his renown. His Europe: A History, published a decade
ago, is full of life and erudition, and has achieved classic status. His
two latest books are both ordered around the theme that has defined
Davies's career as a historian: the passionate belief that the history
of central and eastern Europe has been unfairly neglected, in comparison
to western Europe. A deep love of Poland, in particular, also suffuses
his work.
Writing a history of the second world war from an eastern- European
perspective is both a legitimate and a revealing exercise. As Davies
demonstrates, the most decisive and bloody battles of the war were
fought overwhelmingly on the Russian front. It was the invasion of
Poland which marked the beginning of the second world war. And many of
the conflict's defining episodes - in particular, the Holocaust - took
place in Poland and central Europe.
Seeing the war through Polish eyes also ensures that Davies departs from
the conventional Anglo-American perspective that the second world war
was, above all, a story of the triumph of good over evil. Poland and
most of central Europe ended the war under the sway of Stalin - hardly a
happy ending. Again and again in Europe at War, Davies emphasises the
moral ambiguities of the conflict, arguing that the "war in Europe was
dominated by two evil monsters, not by one". And - more controversially
- that the west's alliance with Stalin meant that: "Victory was
achieved. Moral and political principles were deserted."
But while the Davies view of the war is a corrective to the western
triumphalism of, for example, the late American historian Stephen
Ambrose, there are occasions when Davies over-corrects. For example,
there are more references in his index to the Katyn massacres - the
Soviet Union's murder of 250,000 Polish soldiers - than to D-Day.
There are times also when Davies' iconoclasm seems excessive. Is it
really necessary to use his introduction to criticise the new Holocaust
memorial in Berlin and its "American architect" for being "invasive" and
"making no reference to the millions of the Nazis' non-Jewish victims"?
And while it is fair enough to point out that the western allies left
Poland in the lurch after the war, it is not clear what Davies expected
them to do. His suggestion that the US and Britain might have changed
the ultimate outcome if they had pressed harder to "define what a sphere
of influence actually implied", is not very persuasive.
Europe at War also suffers from an unsatisfactory structure. Perhaps
because he knows how much has already been written on the subject,
Davies largely eschews a conventional narrative in favour of
interpretive essays on such topics as "civilians" and "portrayals". That
makes the book seem disjointed; and the single chapter that Davies
devotes to a narrative history of the fighting comes across as slightly
perfunctory. The most gripping passages turn out to be excerpts from
Antony Beevor's book on Stalingrad.
Inevitably, Davies's collection of essays is patchy in quality. Some are
fairly tedious - like a score-settling with someone who reviewed his
history of Europe badly. But the collection ends with a truly impressive
document entitled "The Rise of New Global Powers", which was prepared as
a memorandum for Britain's Cabinet Office in December 2000 - in other
words before September 11 2001. (Another benefit of being an eminent
historian is that powerful people take you seriously.)
In a section on Iraq and Iran, Davies pointed out that there were
influential members of the Republican Party pushing for an invasion of
Iraq. He argued that this would be a mistake since the removal of Saddam
Hussein "would open up the possibility of a takeover by Shia Islamicists
and of a new anti-American Iraqi-Iranian axis". Blair cannot say he
wasn't warned.
Gideon Rachman is the FT's chief foreign affairs columnist.