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No justification for massacre of innocents
Among the Dead Cities: was the Allied bombing of civilians in World War II a necessity or a crime? The philosopher Anthony Grayling has a strong interest in applying philosophical analysis to major questions of public concern. His answer to the question given in his subtitle is: yes, it was a crime, and not a necessity. Precision bombing by the RAF, even when this was technically difficult, would have had more effect on winning the war than the avowed aim of Air Marshal Arthur ?Bomber? Harris to ?bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill Boche, and to terrify Boche?. Furthermore, once American bombers arrived in Europe in large numbers, they set about hitting military targets with considerable precision (given the technology available), always in daylight and to significant effect, whereas the RAF persisted in indiscriminate ?area bombing? by night. This went on even when it was clear that Germany was already beaten. Dresden was the most notorious victim of this policy. If Grayling is right, the RAF?s indiscriminate bombing strategy had remarkably little effect on the course of the military conflict. It merely inflicted horrendous civilian suffering and death. A key example of civilian bombing was the July 1943 series of onslaughts on Hamburg known as ?Operation Gomorrah?. An appendix printed in the book shows that 38,000 citizens of Hamburg were killed, and 1,350,000 were ?bombed out? in less than a week. Of course, some of these would have been engaged in war-work. But a huge number must also have been innocents. Grayling insists that Operation Gomorrah was unequivocally criminal. Of course, he also insists that Germany (and Japan) committed far worse crimes than this, but their greater criminality does not, and must not be allowed to, cancel out the criminal verdict on the Allied actions. Grayling makes it very clear that at the start of the Second World War there was a determination on the part of Britain, including the RAF itself, not to engage in attacks on innocent civilians. The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had assured President Roosevelt on 1 September 1939 that he would respect the latter?s appeal to refrain from ?bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities?, and this assurance lasted until May 1940. But in any case it was not until 1942 that the RAF had the capacity to inflict major attacks on Germany. Grayling tells us in some detail how the area-bombing policy evolved, steadily eroding Britain?s originally self-denying ordinance. One key moment occurred in August 1940 when the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London by mistake (they were off course) and the RAF chose to retaliate with an (ineffective) attack on Berlin. Far more significant, however, was the appointment of ?Bomber? Harris to head Bomber Command in 1942, together with the emergence of the Lancaster aircraft. It was from this moment that the RAF?s indiscriminate bombing of German civilians really took off.
Grayling?s reasons for revisiting the crimes of the Second World War are that ?history has to be got right before it distorts into legend?, and that we need ?a proper understanding of its implications for how peoples and states can and should behave in times of conflict?. He asks: ?What are the moral lessons for today that we can learn?? I would like to suggest one. It has to do with the Blair Government?s apparent determination to persist with Britain?s nuclear weapons after the current system is worn out. An argument put forward by the most intelligent of those who support this policy is that it is technically possible and morally necessary to limit Britain?s nuclear deterrent threats to ?counter-combatant? targets only. Yet for deterrence to work we have to be willing at some point to carry out our threat. And given the history of the bombing campaigns of the Second World War as set out by Grayling, the question immediately arises: are such self-denying ordinances, limiting our deterrent threats to combatants only, worth the paper they are written on? This is a question that Grayling?s very readable and scrupulously balanced assessment should prompt, while the issue of whether Britain is willing to go on acting criminally, as we did in the war, is still an open one. A final solution in the villages of Asia Minor
Twice a Stranger: how mass expulsion forged modern Greece and Turkey Two years ago, an anti-Albanian mob torched the last mosque in Belgrade. Going in search of it, I found myself in a crowd of bemused Belgraders, many of whom seemed to have no more idea than I that it had still existed ? a charred relic of the time when the city?s skyline was a forest of minarets. The Belgrade Muslims left long ago, in the early years of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish retreat from the Balkans left urban Muslim communities defenceless in the midst of triumphant new Christian states with scores to settle. And so they went, or were pushed. It happened all over the region in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, each wave of expulsions pushing Muslims southwards into a narrow belt of Ottoman Europe stretching from Constantinople to Albania, which itself then fell to Serb, Greek and Bulgarian armies in 1912. But the Turks fought back. After one offensive too many, in 1922 the Greek army reeled back shattered from Asia Minor, first to the port of Smyrna, then to the Greek mainland. Soon, nearly two million Greeks from Asia Minor followed them, wrenched from towns and villages that had been Christian since time immemorial. Down went Smyrna ? today Izmir ? for this was radical ethnic cleansing, a final solution whose provisions were legitimised by an international treaty at Lausanne in 1923. There were to be no loopholes for any, except for the Muslims of Greek Thrace, who remain to this day, and the Greeks of Constantinople, whose stay of execution was only postponed until the 1950s. But were the Asia Minor refugees ?Greek? at all? The term was surely anachronistic for, as Bruce Clark explains in his meticulously researched and balanced account of what Greeks recall as the ?great catastrophe?, many spoke no Greek and had only the faintest notion of what we would think of as an ethnic identity. Clark recalls the fate of 50,000 villagers from Cappadocia who knew of themselves only as Christians. Such Greek as they had was recently acquired, learned from Greek school-teachers who came to these remote mountains in the late nineteenth century, bringing their modern notions of nationalism. These villagers? Turkish speech, their non-involvement in Greece?s expansionist wars and their good relations with Muslim neighbours availed them nothing. All of the Christians, from Cappadocia in the south to Trebizond on the Black Sea paid the same price for the rout of the Greek army in Asia Minor. As Clark explains, the ?Greeks? may have been the most numerous victims of Lausanne, but they were not the only ones. About 400,000 Muslims, many of them descendants of Greek converts to Islam, trudged the opposite way, forced to abandon homes in Salonika and Macedonia for the dry plains of eastern Thrace, or the Turkish mainland. This book is an important piece of history, for Clark has captured some of the memories of the last, nonagenarian, survivors of the expulsion. His knowledge of Greek brings alive recollections that will soon go to the grave. And how fresh some of those memories are: of lungfuls of sweet air, fit to drink, and of flower-filled meadows, last glimpsed more than 80 years ago. Curiously, for all the rose-tinted quality of these memories, few of the survivors told Clark they regretted their brutal expulsion, for all their bitter lamentations about where they have since ended up. Again and again, they say they have slept securely, without fear, since then. So this is an uncomfortable book, with a lesson that is the exact opposite of that taught by international policy-makers today in the Balkans and other conflict zones, which is that expelled minorities must always be returned to their homes, and ethnic cleansing be reversed, so it is not rewarded. There is, for example, pressure on the Kosovo Albanians to allow back the Serbs they made refugees in 1999. Yet these old survivors say no: it was better to be uprooted in the long term, never again to see the church, mosque, or graveyard, Why? Because now they can sleep easy. As Clark puts it, ?any overall analysis ... has to wrestle with a truth which is awkward from a liberal modern point of view; in its own perverse terms, the population exchange ?worked?.?
Admittedly, Clark means it ?worked? in the 1920s, not now. But reading this, one can?t help wondering if all the efforts invested into cajoling Albanians or Croats into receiving back their minority Serbs, for example, won?t turn out to be wasted in the long run, after all. Hops, hemp and witch-hazel
The Secret Life of Trees The title and appearance of the science writer Colin Tudge?s The Secret Life of Trees suggests it is going to be one of those post-Dawkins evolutionary detective stories, where the narrator, clue by clue, unveils the true reason why, for example, the Patagonian crested cormorant lays eggs inside paper bags. In this respect Tudge does not disappoint; but before he launches into his whodunnit, he finds it necessary to run through the entire botanical taxonomy ? orders, clades, genera and so on ? with reference to just about every tree I?ve ever heard of and a good many more besides, and it takes him the best part of 200 pages. My satisfaction at absorbing such a large amount of useful information was dampened by the news that scientists keep moving the categories around. Here?s an example: ?The Cecropiacae family, as now defined by Judd, also includes Cannabis (hemp) and Humulus (hops) . . . In the past, however, Cannabis and Humulus have commonly been placed together in a separate family, Cannabinaceae which in turn has been grouped with the Urticaceae, within their own order, the Urticales. Urticales in turn has sometimes been associated with the witch-hazels in the hamamelid group (now disbanded) and sometimes placed in the Malvales order ? Cecropia has been shuffled uncertainly between the Urticaceae and the Moraceae ?? For anyone familiar with Irish literature, this is reminiscent of the footnotes in Flann O?Brien?s The Third Policeman. What?s worse, the scientists have decided to change the names of many of the families and, inevitably, the ones changed are those most familiar to laymen. The Gramineae, which anybody with a smattering of Latin could recognise as being the grasses, are now Poaceae; the Umbelliferae, memorable because they included all those plants with frilly fronds that spread like an umbrella, such as carrots and cow parsley, have been renamed Apiaceae; and worst of all, the family recognised by all horticulturalists, the nitrogen-bearing Leguminosae, now must be called the Fabaceae (not to be confused with the Fagaceae which are the beeches, oaks and chestnuts). Readers may have to sweep aside a ripple of scepticism as they approach Tudge?s next argument: that the distribution of many different species around the world is due to the world?s landmass being one big blob (Pangaea), which split into two blobs (Laurasia and Gondwana) before forming the continents that we know today. Tudge provides a series of maps resembling medieval charts of the ?here be dragons? kind. But if the scientists can?t make their mind about which tree is related to which, what guarantee do we have that they will change their minds about the movement of continents? In the next section of the book, Tudge attempts to unravel the mystery of why there are 750 species of fig, each dependent for its pollination on its own species of wasp. I can reveal that the denouement involves further species of parasitic wasp which only pretend to be pollinators, nematodes which are parasitic on the pollinator wasps, and fruit bats which scatter pollinated figs in the forest. Tudge is at his most convincing and readable in unravelling complex reciprocal and competitive relationships like this. The Secret Life of Trees ends with a tribute to the unique potential of trees in an age when the world is threatened by global warming, desertification and other apocalyptic threats. To anyone who has some familiarity with the current direction of environmental thought, ?more trees? is a familiar cry. Though it is not abundantly clear how this plea is reinforced by Tudge?s preceding material, it is encouraging that a writer with such wide-ranging scientific knowledge should reach the same conclusion that most people come to through more practical encounters with the world around them.
This is an ungainly book, with much interesting material. If I had been the editor, I would have stuck most of the taxonomy in an appendix, in tabular form (with a column for those fascinating extra titbits of information that Tudge comes up with); and I would have asked the author to structure the book around an argument which spelt out more clearly why the secret lives of trees demonstrates that these plants in particular offer us hope. Suite Fran?aise
Irene Nemirovsky Sixty-four years after Irene Nemirovsky?s death at the hands of the Nazis, the lost manuscript of her last novel, Suite Fran?aise, has been translated and published in English. Days after finishing Part II, ?Dolce?, she was arrested by gendarmes in Vichy France, and taken to Auschwitz, where she died within weeks. The manuscript survived the war thanks to the ingenuity of her eldest daughter, Denise (then 13), who carried the notebook with her as she moved between hiding places ? convents and cellars: ?I didn?t know what it was, but I knew it was important to mother.? The book was initially too painful to read; Denise only began to decipher her mother?s minuscule writing in 1996, and discovered that what she thought to be a diary was in fact her mother?s last novel. Despite the poignancy of the author?s tragic story, Suite Fran?aise stands on its own terms as a masterpiece of French fiction. It is both a beautifully written and savage account of life in wartime France. The novel opens with an air raid in the intense heat of summer. The characters make a tumultuous exodus from Paris. Among them, the Pericands gather together their most precious possessions: linen, silver, their grandfather (in case he disinherits them) and their beloved cat. Other characters fleeing Paris include an egotistical writer; an aesthete who cares only for his porcelain; and an avaricious banker ? two of his employees are among the few honourable characters in the book. Once the fugitives descend on the countryside and food supplies run short, the citizens of France are united; not so much against the enemy, but by their own need to survive. Baskets of food are grabbed, petrol is stolen and a priest in charge of a group of orphans is brutally murdered. The second part is more subdued in tone. Nemirovsky?s lens homes in on one village in occupied France, where tensions and petty rivalries are played out against a background in which villagers are engaged in either collaboration or passive resistance. Apart from occasional price-fixing at the market, the French do little to rise up against the German invaders. The rich hoard their supplies, and although every man has a gun hidden on his property, only one dares to use it.
There are, however, gleams of hope in the boyish heroism of Hubert Pericand and the love affair between a lonely Frenchwoman and a sensitive, music-loving German officer. Although her novel is written with unflinching lucidity, Nemirovsky?s voice is neither rancorous nor bitter. The notes she made for the remaining sections demonstrate that she was all too aware of her own impending fate and this lends the novel an immediacy, intensity and freshness. It stands not only as a fascinating document of the Second World War, but as an exquisite novel and a compelling portrait of France under Nazi occupation. There Were No Windows
Norah Hoult The last years of the life of the novelist Violet Hunt, who died in 1942, were spent in the mists of Alzheimer?s disease. This period was chronicled in fictional form by Norah Hoult, an acquaintance of Hunt, who published There Were No Windows in 1944, changing her protagonist?s name to Claire Temple. Admired and pursued in her youth, Claire is bewildered to find herself alone in old age, but still accompanied by the dreams and aspirations of her younger self. ?Everything wears out,? she says. ?Except me. It?s terrible the way I can?t wear out but go on feeling in my heart, feeling everything.? The book is set in west London in the early 1940s, a time made tangibly evocative. Though parts of Kensington and Notting Hill are recognisable from the descriptions, the city and lifestyle of its inhabitants are, of course, gripped in a time-warp. Yet 60 years of medical advancement has done little to alleviate the symptoms of the Alzheimer?s closing in on Claire Temple, and this gives the novel a strangely contemporary air. Abandoned by her friends and taken advantage of by her cook, ?a horribly cruel creature though she makes good savouries?, Claire is persuaded that she needs to employ a lady to keep her company. However, when a Miss Jones arrives to take up the job, Claire dismisses her sneeringly as ?... half-bred, half-educated ... A ?lydy?!? The sections of the book switch between Claire?s point of view and those of the people around her, whose attitudes vary from sympathetic to patronising to embarrassed and horrified. In spite of her grim subject, Hoult?s story, though sad and raw, is never gloomy and often funny. Claire has Victorian notions of what is right and wrong: she thoroughly disapproves of women who wear trousers and is not sure how to react when her cook addresses her in the wrong way. Claire/Violet comforts herself with memories of the past, going to parties where she is still brilliant and witty and all the men want to dance with her. ?She paused for breath, and then glided and swayed once more, dancing on and on to the music that had played in other years.?
In spite of her eccentricities the reader falls slightly in love with Claire, a romantic character who is here exposed in all the vulnerability of old age. It could easily become too depressing, but There Were No Windows has a lightness of touch. It?s beautifully written and Norah Hoult has produced an honest, compelling account of Alzheimer?s without ever betraying her friend.  |
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