Good and Evil in World War II.

• Author: Beechey, David
• Position: Book review

Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat - Good and Evil in World War II, Harper Collins, ISBN-13: 9780060580971, 672 pp., 2011, $29.99

Americans like to think of the Second World War as "The Good War" and after reading Moral Combat they will find that Michael Burleigh also believes that description to be accurate. He is unsparing in his analysis of the horrors that both Nazism and Communism spawned and also quite clear that the Allies (excluding the Soviet Union) morally deserved to win whereas the Axis, by their actions, deserved to lose.

Burleigh makes it clear that Stalin probably caused the deliberate deaths of more Jews than Hitler but the German propensity for recording everything both on film as well as on paper has meant that we almost exclusively blame them not the Soviets.

The Japanese are a different matter and one comes to the conclusion that the war in the Far East became, in essence, a race war. U. S. Marines went into combat on Iwo Jima, according to Burleigh, with "Rodent Exterminator" stencilled on their helmets. He even goes so far as to state "American attitudes towards the Japanese were not far distant from the Nazi view of the Jews." Phew! He goes on to cite many disturbing anecdotes to justify this. Don't misunderstand this, though, because his documentation of the Japanese atrocities is vivid and detailed to a sickening degree.

This is a history of the Second World War viewed through the eyes of the men in the three totalitarian states, Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan - who either rejected morality or produced their own distorted one - and in Britain and the United States, where the great majority understood the choices available and got on with defeating what they perceived to be wickedness and evil.

He exposes the distorted morality of the Nazis with clarity and it is fascinating when he describes how they had a "moral code of a sort ... and this was enforced by the courts" to such an extent that such crimes as being drunk, discharging firearms at signs, taking bribes, taking whores into the guardhouse and many other relatively minor offences were punished and often severely. Burleigh comes to the conclusion that "maintenance of this partial group morality made it easier for some Germans to behave so abominably to the majority population who were excluded from their orbit of concern and enjoyed no legal protections." He also maintains that forbidden as they were both by inclination and law from showing pity to the people...