Antony Beevor on the history of the second world war: 'There are things that are too horrific to put in a book’
The historian Antony Beevor tells Keith Lowe why his next book will confront one of the last taboos of the Second World War
Antony Beevor has sleepless nights. When I met him recently at his west London home, he confessed this in a matter-of-fact way, and neither of us sees anything unusual in it. We each take it for granted that any historian who immerses himself in the study of the Second World War, as both of us have for most of our working lives, is bound to suffer occasional bouts of disturbed sleep.
Antony Beevor has sleepless nights. When I met him recently at his west London home, he confessed this in a matter-of-fact way, and neither of us sees anything unusual in it. We each take it for granted that any historian who immerses himself in the study of the Second World War, as both of us have for most of our working lives, is bound to suffer occasional bouts of disturbed sleep.
His own insomnia, he tells me, tends to hit him only during
intense periods of research, or when he is preparing to write about some of the
more disturbing aspects of the war. “Of course, you mustn’t let it get to you
straight away because you’ve got to get the facts down accurately,” he says.
“But it will get to you a few nights later. In the middle of the night, you’ll
suddenly wake up, and it will be there at the back of your mind.”
Certainly, many of the subjects Beevor has covered have been
dark. His history of the battle of Stalingrad, which catapulted him to
international fame in 1998, described one of the most bitterly fought campaigns
of the Second World War. He admits that some of the accounts he discovered,
particularly of soldiers starving in the snow, still haunt him today. His
subsequent book about the battle for the German capital, Berlin: The Downfall
1945, described the rape of German women on a vast scale – a subject that
repeatedly drove him to tears. Most recently, The Second World War described in
sickening detail the way that some Japanese soldiers in south east Asia not
only cannibalised their dead, but even reared and slaughtered prisoners of war
to be eaten.
Writing about such things has not always provoked kind
reactions among his critics. Fellow historian Niall Ferguson once accused him
of writing war pornography, a charge he categorically rejects. “One has to try
to understand these things,” he says. “Let’s face it, the duty of a historian
is to understand, and to try to convey that understanding to others.” In fact,
given the brutal nature of war, he feels he has actually been relatively
restrained. There are many details that have never made it into his books. In
his history of the Soviet attack on Berlin, for example, he stopped short of
including graphic accounts of German suicide attempts, including the suicides of
young children. “I left them out because you couldn’t read them without
bursting into tears. There are things that you can’t put in a book because they
are too horrific. And yet at the same time you wonder afterwards if you are
chickening out by not putting them in.”
If there’s one thing that sets Beevor apart from other
historians – beyond his gifts as a storyteller – it’s that he is not afraid to
look at the most uncomfortable, even frightening subjects, but does so in a way
that doesn’t threaten the reader. There’s rarely a judgmental note to his
writing. It’s like having Virgil there to lead you through the underworld: he
doesn’t leave you stranded amid the horror, but leads you back out again, a
wiser person for having undergone the journey.
He has a knack for choosing controversial subjects at the
right moment – when they are raw enough to touch a nerve, but not so raw as to
be too painful to acknowledge. His latest is an account of the battle of the
Ardennes in 1944. The book, which comes out this month, is a natural
progression from his earlier history of D-Day. There is the same political
tension between the British and American commanders; there is the same
desperation in the fighting of ordinary soldiers on both sides; but at the
heart of it lies another dark subject: the indiscriminate killing of prisoners.
This, Beevor says, is “unmentionable”, one of the last taboos of the war. “I
still haven’t read any American historian on the subject of the shooting of
prisoners. And until recently I don’t think many British historians have
written about the British killing of prisoners. That was something the Germans
did, but we prefer not to talk about our boys doing it.”
The book begins with a description of one of the battles
that preceded Hitler’s massive Ardennes offensive, and it is this that sets the
tone of the pages to come. In the autumn of 1944, the Allied advance across
western Europe finally got bogged down on the borders of Germany. The Americans
found themselves entangled in a bitter fight for the Hürtgen forest, a place
that, in Beevor’s words, was “so dense and so dark that it soon seemed cursed,
as if in a sinister fairy-tale of witches and ogres”. There is no hyperbole in
this description, he insists. “It is purely a reflection of the way the
soldiers saw it themselves. Everybody who described that place talked of it in
those sort of terms.” As part of his research, Beevor visited the forest, “and
there is something spooky about it”.
Here, men on both sides developed extraordinarily creative
ways of killing one another. They fired bursts of artillery at the tree tops so
that splinters would tear through the people below. They learnt to play on the
instincts of their enemies, placing landmines wherever they might seek shelter,
such as in hollows or shell holes. Soldiers were often afraid to look about
them, because they were too busy scanning the forest floor for trip wires. The
Germans, in particular, developed a habit of placing explosive charges beneath
American wounded or dead, knowing that as soon as a rescue team or burial party
tried to move them, they, too, would be killed by the explosion.
“This is not a normal part of human behaviour,” Beevor tells
me. The purpose of tactics such as this was not only to kill the enemy but also
destroy their spirit. Both sides, he says, knew that demoralising the enemy
could be the key to winning each battle; thus brutality, even atrocity, became
an integral part of the fighting.
Over the coming weeks, the logic of such brutality would be
tested to the full. On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched their
counter-attack across the boggy fields and wooded hills of south east Belgium.
Much of the German army was made up of SS soldiers who had served in Russia,
where they were notorious for torching villages and killing all the
inhabitants. Now they brought the fighting methods of the eastern front to the
heart of Belgium: civilians suspected of sympathising with the Americans were
murdered, women were raped, farmhouses looted, and prisoners of war were shot.
There were several massacres, most notably at Malmédy, where 130 American
prisoners were herded into a field by SS Panzergrenadiers and 84 were
machine-gunned to death.
Faced with this onslaught, the American defenders fell back
in disarray. The units defending this part of the line were already demoralised
by their recent encounters in the Hürtgen forest, and many of them now simply
broke down. Those who suffered worst were the new recruits who had only
recently joined their units to replace men who had already died. “There
probably is no more desperate position than finding yourself in combat for the
first time,” Beevor says. “It’s counter to every form of normal human
experience. It becomes intensely personal, as if every bullet is aimed at you,
as if every shell is aimed at you. The poor b--- came in without proper
training - they were the ones who cracked in no time at
all.”
The morale of American troops quickly became a serious
problem. Instances of self-inflicted injuries increased as traumatised soldiers
did whatever they could to escape the violence of the front. Usually these
injuries took the form of an “accidental” rifle shot through the left hand or
the foot, but one soldier from the 99th Infantry Division was so desperate that
he lay down beside a large tree, reached around it, and exploded a grenade in
his hand.
However, if the shock of the German attack struck fear into
some American soldiers, it seemed to have the opposite effect on others. “The
determination to fight back was astonishing,” says Beevor, “and probably the
most important contribution to the eventual outcome.” News of the atrocities
committed by SS troops also strengthened American resolve.
At this point, Beevor begins to tell me some of the savage
details of American revenge. Their first targets, he says, were SS soldiers,
who were often shot out of hand. He also talks of at least one platoon that
vowed never to take any prisoners at all: whenever the Germans raised a white
flag, a sergeant would stand up and beckon them closer before giving his men
the command to fire. At Chenogne the 11th Armoured Division shot 60 German
prisoners: “There was no secret about it – Patton even mentions it in his
diaries.”
Perhaps the most shocking thing about this culture of
revenge is that the American commanders were not only complicit but actively
encouraged it. “There was anger among the commanders that they had been
taken by surprise. There was a large element of embarrassment. When something
like that happens, you get very angry, and you refuse to accept responsibility
for what you’ve done.” Several of the American generals openly approved of the
killing of prisoners, and gloried in the gruesome nicknames the Germans were
beginning to know their troops by, such as “Roosevelt’s butchers”.
As we talk, it is clear that Beevor struggles with these
issues. Outside academia, there are few people who are prepared to look
unflinchingly at the less flattering parts of our behaviour – and certainly no
one with Beevor’s large readership has. What’s more, it is one thing to state
that such events happened – an admission that many historians have shied away
from – but quite another to know how to react to them. The whole subject runs
counter to our most cherished communal myths about British and American heroism
and gallantry.
Beevor knows instinctively that he must tread carefully,
neither condoning the revenge nor reaching for outright condemnation. “I think what one should try to do is to leave the moral
judgments up to the reader. There’s no use in being judgmental. Far from it; we
can only speculate as to how we would react in the circumstances ourselves,” he
says. For the first time in our conversation, he displays a
flicker of discomfort.
“Why do we do this to ourselves?” I ask. Surely there are less
disturbing ways for a historian to make a living – ways that do not involve the
study of violence, atrocity and inhumanity? He answers with a single word:
“Fascination.” He says it casually, in the same way that he spoke about his
sleepless nights, but after everything we have spoken about the word is
impregnated with layers of meaning. There is his fascination with the war
period, which, he says, defined the world that he grew up in. There is his
fascination with man’s ability to endure the most incomprehensible violence,
and his fascination with what makes some men break while others are able to
rise above their most primitive instincts. And beneath it all, there is that
compulsion to lean over the abyss and gaze into the heart of darkness. “I’m
afraid the whole nature of evil is something we are all fascinated by.”
Sadly, I have to agree.
Keith Lowe is the author of Savage Continent: Europe in
the Aftermath of World War II
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