War, but not as we know it

Joanna Bourke is a controversial historian who won a Wolfson History Prize with her book An Intimate History of Killing, in which she argued, in effect, that soldiers quite enjoyed the First World War because they liked killing people. This short history of the Second World War slightly refines the theory: in that war, she argues, soldiers liked killing innocent civilians. This book abounds in corpses, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

For sheer gore per page it is unbeatable value - there are eyeballs popping out in medical "experiments" on POWs, babies being tossed onto bayonets and a photo of a decapitated Japanese head hung on a tree, "presumably put there by American soldiers". Yet there is a very unappetising sense of moral relativism to it all, for nowhere in the book is the reader told that the war was worth fighting or even that the Allies were any better than the Axis powers.

For Mrs Bourke the war is simply the story of killing on a vast scale across the continents, from Japan's "reluctant" invasion of China in 1931 until her surrender after America's "atrocious aggression" at Nagasaki in 1945.

According to this fatally skewed account, Adolf Hitler was just another "unprincipled opportunistic" world leader, whose policy "was fundamentally one of continuity with German politics prior to 1918 and during the Weimar period". If anyone can be blamed for the outbreak of the war, she maintains, it was the Allies, whose Versailles Treaty of 1919 had "set up a marker for another conflict". According to her it was not Germany but "the European Powers" which "embarked on carnage" in 1939.

Although Japanese atrocities are mentioned, it is the Americans whose alleged sins are lovingly pored over and examined. "Allied feelings of racial superiority and ignorance of Japanese military culture almost lost them the war," she states without giving any evidence for the claim.

American servicemen who raped women in Okinawa, looted corpses and killed POWs in hot blood are held up to special obloquy, without our being given any indication as to how general these practices were.

Most seriously, the author holds up the use of the atomic bombs as a war crime, absurdly claiming that their being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place without direct orders, whereas we know that President Truman took the decision personally. Her claim that Japan was effectively defeated by 1945 and that the bombs were therefore unnecessary does not obviate the fact that had they not been dropped millions of Japanese would have fought on to the end, taking thousands of Allied servicemen with them. Being defeated and accepting it are two very different things.

It is said that this book is being considered for widespread distribution in schools. This should not happen, unless we want future generations to believe that we fought the war according to much the same moral precepts as the Nazis and Imperial Japan, whose leaders were in no significant way different from Messrs Churchill and Roosevelt. Mrs Bourke's references to "Britain's safe shores" in 1940, America's aggression against Japan, the Battle of the Atlantic being "a mere catchphrase" and Hitler not representing "the ultimate in human evil" because he had no "coherent plan", are not ones for young people who might very well read nothing else about the war.

There are also the staggering truisms, banalities and cliches, surprising in so undoubtedly intelligent a writer. Here is a sample, taken at random:

"War involves killing people." "The map of the world had to be redrafted." "This was truly a world war." Best of all, about the battle of the Atlantic: "Clearly, this was a tough campaign for all concerned, particularly for the ordinary seamen. Naval warfare was very different from battle on land." You don't say.

In refusing to admit that there was anything uplifting about civilisation's victory in the great crusade against Hitlerism, Mrs Bourke is presenting the 1931-45 period as one of unremitting viciousness, waste and stupidity, in which everyone was more or less equally to blame. She subtitles her portrayal of the war A People's History, but it is not one that many people will recognise.