| |
Unorthodox perspective on Hitler pre-1941
• WITH reference to my book review of Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, I owe your two correspondents an apology (Letters, July 3).
Of course, the raid on Coventry was not the first piece of large scale indiscriminate bombing in the Second World War. But it was (as I meant to say) the first experienced by this country. It was certainly Churchill’s hope that such an attack would bring the Americans into the war but he had to wait for Pearl Harbour for that to happen.
“All Allied bombing was lawful,” says Hugo Barnacle. I urge him to read The Withered Garland by Group Captain Peter Johnson, who led many raids on Germany. Increasingly Johnson came to believe that what he was being asked to do was not only immoral and illegal but, as he discovered from the work of the post-war commission of which he was a member, largely ineffectual in achieving its aims.
Nicholson Baker, the author, “in Holocaust denial”?
The last quotation in the book (which is nothing but nearly 500 quotations) is dated 1941 and the Holocaust is not even mentioned though much of the horrible cruelty up to that date, experienced by the Jews of Germany, certainly is. So too is the refusal of other countries to take Jewish refugees.
The failure of 1932/3 League of Nations Disarmament Conference? Philip Noel-Baker, who was there, puts the blame, in his 1979 book, squarely on the British government. He also singles out Churchill in particular for the failure of the previous Coolidge Conference in 1927. He wanted then, says Noel-Baker, “Britain to be able to have a fleet larger than that of the US”.
However, this ding-donging of quotations will not get us much further.
People might well wish to make up their own minds by reading the book.
An unorthodox perspective on the Hitler years up to 1941? Certainly, but is that such a bad thing?
BRUCE KENT
|
 |
|
| |
