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History See other History Articles Title: American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany Back in Junior High School I became an avid war-gamer, and was fascinated by the military history of the past, especially World War II, the most titanic conflict ever recorded. However, although I much enjoyed reading the detailed accounts of the battles of that war, especially on the Eastern Front that largely determined its outcome, I had much less interest in the accompanying political history, and simply relied upon the accounts in my standard textbooks, which I considered quite reliable. Supporting that strong impression, these sources hardly seemed to hide some of the uglier aspects of the conflict and its aftermath, such as the notable brutalities visited upon pro-Nazi turncoats following the Liberation of France in 1944. Pierre Laval, head of the puppet Vichy government and quite a number of his fellow quislings were tried and executed for their treason, and even Marshal Petain, the renowned French World War I hero who in his dotage had sadly lent his name to the hated regime as its head of state, was condemned to death, though his life was eventually spared. Less prominent collaborators suffered as well, with my books often carrying photos of some of the hundreds or thousands of ordinary French women who for fear, love, or money had become intimate with German soldiers during the four years of occupation, and as a consequence had their heads shaved and were marched through the streets of their towns or cities in parades of shame. Such excesses were obviously unfortunate, but wars and liberations often unleash considerable brutality, and these spectacles of public humiliation obviously did not begin to compare with the vicious bloodshed of the years of Nazi control. For example, there was the notorious case of Oradour-sur-Glane, a village involved in Resistance activities, in which many hundreds of men, women, and children were herded into a church and other buildings and burned alive. Meanwhile, enormous numbers of Frenchmen and others had been deported to wartime Germany as slave-laborers, in total violation of every legal principle, producing an uncanny parallel to Stalin’s Gulag and underscoring the similarity of those two totalitarian regimes. This, at least, had always been my limited impression of that very unfortunate era. Eventually, major cracks in this simple picture began appearing. I have previously written of my discovery of John T. Flynn, one of America’s most prominent liberal public intellectuals throughout the 1930s, who was then purged from the mainstream media and eventually forgotten for his discordant views on certain contentious issues. From the early 1940s onward, Flynn’s books only found a home at the Devin-Adair Company, a small Irish-American publishing house based in New York City. Somehow or other, perhaps six or seven years ago I became aware of another book released by that same press in 1953. The author of Unconditional Hatred was Captain Russell Grenfell, a British naval officer who had served with distinction in the First World War, and later helped direct the Royal Navy Staff College, while publishing six highly-regarded books on naval strategy and serving as the Naval Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Grenfell recognized that great quantities of extreme propaganda almost inevitably accompany any major war, but with several years having passed since the close of hostilities, he was growing concerned that unless an antidote were soon widely applied, the lingering poison of such wartime exaggerations might threaten the future peace of Europe. His considerable historical erudition and his reserved academic tone shine through in this fascinating volume, which focuses primarily upon the events of the two world wars, but often contains digressions into the Napoleonic conflicts or even earlier ones. One of the intriguing aspects of his discussion is that much of the anti-German propaganda he seeks to debunk would today be considered so absurd and ridiculous it has been almost entirely forgotten, while much of the extremely hostile picture we currently have of Hitler’s Germany receives almost no mention whatsoever, possibly because it had not yet been established or was then still considered too outlandish for anyone to take seriously. Among other matters, he reports with considerable disapproval that leading British newspapers had carried headlined articles about the horrific tortures that were being inflicted upon German prisoners at war crimes trials in order to coerce all sorts of dubious confessions out of them. Some of Grenfell’s casual claims do raise doubts about various aspects of our conventional picture of German occupation policies. He notes numerous stories in the British press of former French “slave-laborers” who later organized friendly post-war reunions with their erstwhile German employers. He also states that in 1940 those same British papers had reported the absolutely exemplary behavior of German soldiers toward French civilians, though after terroristic attacks by Communist underground forces provoked reprisals, relations often grew much worse. Most importantly, he points out that the huge Allied strategic bombing campaign against French cities and industry had killed huge numbers of civilians, probably far more than had ever died at German hands, and thereby provoked a great deal of hatred as an inevitable consequence. At Normandy he and other British officers had been warned to remain very cautious among any French civilians they encountered for fear they might be subject to deadly attacks. Although Grenfell’s content and tone strike me as exceptionally even-handed and objective, others surely viewed his text in a very different light. The Devin-Adair jacket-flap notes that no British publisher was willing to accept the manuscript, and when the book appeared no major American reviewer recognized its existence. Even more ominously, Grenfell is described as having been hard at work on a sequel when he suddenly died in 1954 of unknown causes, and his lengthy obituary in the London Times gives his age as 62. With the copyright having long lapsed, I am pleased to include this important volume in my collection of HTML Books so that those interested can easily read it and decide for themselves. Unconditional Hatred Captain Russell Grenfell • 1953 • 73,000 Words On French matters, Grenfell provides several extended references to a 1952 book entitled France: The Tragic Years, 1939-1947 by Sisley Huddleston, an author totally unfamiliar to me, and this whet my curiosity. One helpful use of my content-archiving system is to easily provide the proper context for long-forgotten writers, and Huddleston’s scores of appearances in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Republic, plus his thirty well-regarded books on France, seem to confirm that he spent decades as one of the leading interpreters of France to educated American and British readers. Indeed, his exclusive interview with British Prime Minister Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference became an international scoop. As with so many other writers, after World War II his American publisher necessarily became Devin-Adair, which released a posthumous 1955 edition of his book. Given his eminent journalistic credentials, Huddleston’s work on the Vichy period was reviewed in American periodicals, although in rather cursory and dismissive fashion, and I ordered a copy and read it. I cannot attest to the correctness of Huddleston’s 350 page account of France during the war years and immediately after, but as a very distinguished journalist and longtime observer who was an eyewitness to the events he describes, writing at a time when the official historical narrative had not yet hardened into concrete, I do think that his views should be taken quite seriously. Huddleston’s personal circle certainly extended quite high, with former U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt being one of his oldest friends. And without doubt Huddleston’s presentation is radically different from the conventional story I had always heard. Judging the credibility of a source from such a distance in time is not easy, but sometimes a single telling detail provides an important clue. In revisiting Huddleston’s book, I noticed he casually mentioned that in Spring 1940 the French and British had been on the very verge of a military attack against Soviet Russia, which they regarded as Germany’s crucial ally, and planned an assault on Baku, intending to destroy Stalin’s great oil fields of the Caucasus by a strategic bombing campaign. I had never read a single mention of this in any of my World War II histories, and until recently I would have dismissed the story as an absurd rumor of that era, long since debunked. But just a couple of weeks ago, I discovered a 2015 article in The National Interest confirming these exact facts, over seventy years after they had understandably been expunged from all of our mainstream historical narratives. As Huddleston describes things, the French army collapsed in May of 1940, and the government desperately recalled Petain, then in his mid-80s and the country’s greatest war hero, from his posting as the Ambassador to Spain. Soon he was asked by the French President to form a new government and arrange an armistice with the victorious Germans, and this proposal received near-unanimous support from France’s National Assembly and Senate, including the backing of virtually all the leftist parliamentarians. Petain achieved this result, and another near-unanimous vote of the French parliament then authorized him to negotiate a full peace treaty with Germany, which certainly placed his political actions on the strongest possible legal basis. At that point, almost everyone in Europe believed that the war was essentially over, with Britain soon to make peace. While Petain’s fully-legitimate French government was negotiating with Germany, a small number of diehards, including Col. Charles de Gaulle, deserted from the army and fled aboard, declaring that they intended to continue the war indefinitely, but they initially attracted minimal support or attention. One interesting aspect of the situation was that De Gaulle had long been one of Petain’s leading proteges, and once his political profile began rising a couple of years later, there were often quiet speculations that he and his old mentor had arranged a “division of labor,” with the one making an official peace with the Germans while the other left to become the center of overseas resistance in the uncertain event that different opportunities arose. Although Petain’s new French government guaranteed that its powerful navy would never be used against the British, Churchill took no chances, and quickly launched an attack on the fleet of its erstwhile ally, whose ships were already disarmed and helplessly moored in port, sinking most of them, and killing up to 2,000 Frenchmen in the process. This incident was not entirely dissimilar to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following year, and rankled the French for many years to come. Huddleston then spends much of the book discussing the complex French politics of the next few years, as the war unexpectedly continued, with Russia and America eventually joining the Allied cause, greatly raising the odds against a German victory. During this period, the French political and military leadership performed a difficult balancing act, resisting German demands on some points and acquiescing to them on others, while the internal Resistance movement gradually grew, attacking German soldiers and provoking harsh German reprisals. Given my lack of expertise, I cannot really judge the accuracy of his political narrative, but it seems quite realistic and plausible to me, though specialists might surely find fault. However, the most remarkable claims in Huddleston’s book come towards the end, as he describes what eventually became known as “the Liberation of France” during 1944-45 when the retreating German forces abandoned the country and pulled back to their own borders. Among other things, he suggests that the number of Frenchmen claiming “Resistance” credentials grew as much as a hundred-fold once the Germans had left and there was no longer any risk in adopting that position. And at that point, enormous bloodshed soon began, by far the worst wave of extra-judicial killings in all of French history. Most historians agree that around 20,000 lives were lost in the notorious “Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution and perhaps 18,000 died during the Paris Commune of 1870-71 and its brutal suppression. But according to Huddleston the American leaders estimated there were at least 80,000 “summary executions” in just the first few months after Liberation, while the Socialist Deputy who served as Interior Minister in March 1945 and would have been in the best position to know, informed De Gaulle’s representatives that 105,000 killings had taken place just from August 1944 to March 1945, a figure that was widely quoted in public circles at the time. Since a large fraction of the entire French population had spent years behaving in ways that now suddenly might be considered “collaborationist,” enormous numbers of people were vulnerable, even at risk of death, and they sometimes sought to save their own lives by denouncing their acquaintances or neighbors. Underground Communists had long been a major element of the Resistance, and many of them eagerly retaliated against their hated “class enemies,” while numerous individuals took the opportunity to settle private scores. Another factor was that many of the Communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, including thousands of the members of the International Brigades, had fled to France after their military defeat in 1938, and now often took the lead in enacting vengeance against the same sort of conservative forces who had previously vanquished them in their own country. Although Huddleston himself was an elderly, quite distinguished international journalist with very highly placed American friends, and he had performed some minor services on behalf of the Resistance leadership, he and his wife narrowly escaped summary execution during that period, and he provides a collection of the numerous stories he heard of less fortunate victims. But what appears to have been by far the worst sectarian bloodshed in French history has been soothingly rechristened “the Liberation” and almost entirely removed from our historical memory, except for the famously shaved heads of a few disgraced women. These days Wikipedia constitutes the congealed distillation of our Official Truth, and its entry on those events puts the death toll at barely one-tenth the figures quoted by Huddleston, but I find him a far more credible source. France: The Tragic Years, 1939-1947 Sisley Huddleston • 1955 • 65,000 Words Often knocking the first hole in a mighty wall is the most difficult. Once I became persuaded that my entire understanding of the post-war history of France was entirely wrong and to some extent backward, I naturally became much more open to further revelations. If France—a leading member of the victorious Allied coalition of World War II—had actually suffered an unprecedented orgy of revolutionary terror and killings, perhaps my standard history had also been less than totally candid in its description of defeated Germany’s fate. I had certainly read of the horrors inflicted by Russian troops, with perhaps two million German women and girls brutally raped, and there was also a sentence or two about the expulsion of many millions of ethnic Germans from the lands controlled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern European countries vengeful after their years under the terrible Nazi yoke. There was also some mention of the remarkably vindictive Morgenthau Plan, fortunately almost immediately abandoned, and a focus on the German economic rebirth under the generosity of America’s Marshall Plan. But I began to wonder if there was actually more to the story. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
There is ALWAYS more to the story. Some of it true,some of it false,and most of it a mixture of both. If you want a real eye-opener about WW-2,look for the video series "Russia's War,Blood on the Snow". Probably 12+ hours of archived film and documents from the archives of the NKVD,and it sugar coats nothing. It even reports on Stalin's one and only visit to the "Front Lines" where he panicked when he got close enough to hear the artillery fire in the distance,and ordered his driver to turn the car around and go back to Moscow. His limo got stuck in the mud,so he ordered some of the General Staff out of the car they were riding in and fled back to Moscow,leaving his General Staff stuck in a mudhole. It also mentions the treaties between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany,the plan to jointly invade and occupy Poland,death courts at the Lubyanka,where there were "trials" of "enemies of the state" held in a courtroom,while people already convicted and condemned stood in line at the elevator to the basement where the executions were committed. I don't believe there is a single Soviet atrocity that is not mentioned. There is also a lot of captured Nazi film that shows things like Nazi troops leading a whole village in the Ukraine into the village church,nailing the doors and windows shut,and then setting fire to the church with flame throwers as the Nazi officers drink champagne and celebrate "another victory against the Slavs". These monsters not only documented their OWN war crimes,but were proud to be seen committed them on film. If you don't want to buy the series,you can probably check it out of your local library. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Germany considered the Slavs to be subhuman. So much for that from the master race. ;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Well,the Nazi Leadership did,anyhow. Who knows what the typical German thought,other than "I do not have a public opinion on anything!". ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Kikes made the difference after World War Jew -- the vanquished became the ultimate, eternal pariah of all history, to be despised and held responsible for the sins of all personkind forever. (Very pointedly the Germans but not the Japs.) "Never forgive" -- this is the jew essence, and it pervades every atom of what's left of the West today with Nasti Germany the perpetual fulcrum and rationale. Kikes hate the Ayrabs so we get to be Israel's junkyard dog against them for 1000 years.... because Hitler! _____________________________________________________________ USA! USA! USA! Bringing you democracy, or else! there were strains of VD that were incurable, and they were first found in the Philippines and then transmitted to the Korean working girls via US military. The 'incurables' we were told were first taken back to a military hospital in the Philippines to quietly die. – 4um
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