The Fear and the Freedom: How The Second World War Changed Us

Keith Lowe

Viking, £25

Review by Brian Morton

I WAS born in 1954. I think there was still rationing on sweets and possibly petrol, not that those mattered much to a nursing baby. What I did take in with my mother’s milk, though, was an awareness of “the war” as a cardinal event, a great experience, a way of living once dominant but now gone, regretted and not regretted in almost equal measure.

As I grew up, it became clear that there were gaps on city streets like lost teeth from wartime bombs, but that my own teeth, and my bones, were protected by something called “the National Health”, which had an almost mystical sound. Older people would pat me on the head and reassure me that, at least, I would never have to fight, or die, or lose someone in another war.

You grow up. You read. You’re subjected to the curiously ideological brand of history teaching that pervaded even Scottish primary schools in the early 1960s. And a very different version of the war emerges. It’s puzzling because in many ways it seems to conflict with the family version, which was not in any way untypical but which now seems uncomfortably out of step with a historical consensus.

For a man like my father, the war was all opportunity. It represented alternative, if not actual escape, from a cushioning family. London at the tail end of the blitz was “exciting”. Hitler seemed like a rather abstract threat, a strangely compelling voice on radio who nevertheless seemed almost comically angry with us. War took my father to London, and then while some of his division went off on the road that led to Monte Cassino, to Africa, where he spent the next two years unspokenly preparing a new nation to break free from its cushioning family. That atlas was turning less pink, more varied in hue.

Keith Lowe’s extraordinary new study of “the war” and its impacts relies entirely on personal stories and on the tension between them and the received and passed down view of recent history that represents our various national mythologies. It is a book that might well attract some negative notice, so thoroughly does it demolish some of the more comfortable assumptions about the nuclear age, the aftermath of the Holocaust, the United States’s status as world policeman, of the United Kingdom’s as a small nation that had lost an empire and not yet found a role.

Each chapter is thirled to one individual and to one theme. A key early one is headed Heroes and tells the story of Leonard Creo, an old US army soldier wounded near Strasbourg in the early weeks of 1945, sent home a decorated “hero”, only to discover that all of his comrades were “heroes” and that thus, almost by definition, every young American since who has donned a uniform is, ipso facto, a “hero”. Leonard isn’t bitter about this. The war made him what he is. It gave him the education, the life experience and the freedom to become an artist. Without the war, which he had followed “like it was a football game” before America’s entry after Pearl Harbor, his life would have been, one suspects, quite dull. There is nothing about him of the embittered returning soldier, a figure cemented into myth by Ernest Hemingway and others.

One of the most powerful literary critical books of recent times was Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which suggested that the paradigm of the Western Front, as represented in war poetry and memoirs had fixed for ever our understanding about what war was; which meant that all future wars – whether the Second World War, Korean or Vietnam wars, and by extension the Gulf conflicts – have been seen through that prism. Lowe suggests an alternative, and an alternative to that alternative. “The war” still means the Second World War. Its mythologies are still with us, and still troublingly unquestioned. My mother, who doesn’t play a minor part in this, still insists, as others sincerely do, that there was little or no crime during the war, that communities pulled together warmly, with petty greeds and feuds set aside. The reality unfortunately is that the war camouflaged a devastating crime wave, with offences against property and persons at record highs, and sexual crime in some places virtually the norm. But then from another perspective the most violent and shocking events of the war, culminating in the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not greeted with the nihilistic horror one soon began to encounter in blackest-ever-black student essays, but were often seen as excitingly apocalyptic, the brutal birth pangs of a New World.

For some, of course, a whole world seemed to have ended. The most obviously controversial aspects of any book of this kind are bound to focus on the Holocaust. Lowe gently reminds us that the first soldiers to open the concentration camps and encounter the surviving inmates, were not moved to pity, or to anger against the perpetrators. They were instead disgusted and shrank from the half-human figures in front of them. They turned away and only turned back when the mechanised deaths of Europe’s rainbow of minorities had been sanitised (and Christianised) and presented as a narrative of goodness trampled down but undefeated by evil. One of Lowe’s most powerful points is that the demonisation and dehumanisation of “the enemy” always preceded the actual act. Men and women were treated as vermin because a generation of cartoonists and leader writers had defined them as vermin.

This same process takes other turns. Auschwitz survivor Otto Dov Kulka cannot watch films about Auschwitz or the other camps because the experience dramatised bears no relation to what he experienced. And the view is widely shared, as Lowe says: “Their individual stories, while individually respected, have been sacrificed on the altar of a more general, and more convenient, mythology. In the eyes of the world, the Holocaust survivor has been reduced to little more than ‘a museum piece, a fossil, a freak, a ghost’”. This is so deeply uncomfortable it rings with truth.

The term Holocaust itself underwent a change during the war. Sometimes it meant simply terrible conflict. Sometimes it was used specifically of the destruction of Japanese cities by atomic weapons, the heat-death of a culture when faced with Western rationality. And yet there were Japanese who regarded the bombs as an annealing and ultimately healing force. The story of radiologist Nagai Takashi, who was caught up in the hot wind and rays of the Nagasaki bomb is a remarkable one. His Christian response to the bombing, set out in his book The Bells of Nagasaki, saw the bombings, and by extension the whole desperate conflict in the Pacific, as the clearing away of a corrupt old world and an exhausted iteration of humanity, with the hope that a bright new future awaited. For many of the combatants, 1945 seemed like a Year Zero, or Stunde Null, from which a new world would emerge.

It would be misleading to present Lowe’s book as a revisionist account of familiar horrors. As the title suggests, much of it is concerned with how the war seemed to open up new possibilities, in health, education, in ways of living. Unlike the First World War, which did seem to mark the end of a way of life with little immediate prospect of anything other than a chastened return to the status quo ante bellum, the Second World War was regarded almost universally as an opportunity to remake the world. The European atlas had already undergone change in 1918, as it had at regular intervals since 1815, but the nature of change and the steady transformation of the European colonies in Africa and Asia, meant that the new colouration of the maps was radically different, with a hint of Utopia – or Uhuru – in the foreground. We still live in that world, and for all its complexities and conflicts, it has proved to be surprisingly stable. The breakdown of the Balkans (significantly a weak element in Lowe’s account) is an exception that tends to prove the general rule.

This is an important book, impossible to summarise, profound in its humanity, bold in its confrontation of sacred myths. “The war” is still with us, not in a Cenotaph sense, but because it shaped almost all of us alive since 1945 with a certain understanding – some of it accurate, some of it self-serving, some of it self-protective – about how the world functions. It has served us surprisingly well, but it needs to be understood for what it is. Believing a mythology knowing that it is a mythology is the greatest freedom. Believing it to be simple truth is a delusion.