Uncertain times ahead for post-war Iraq

By GRAHAM REID

British military historian Antony Beevor has written striking accounts of the Liberation of Paris, the siege of Stalingrad and most recently the fall of Berlin to the invading Russian army.

Berlin:The Downfall 1945 is graphic and grim, Beevor estimates two million women were raped, some repeatedly, and the battle was marked by vengeance for what the Nazis did in Stalingrad.

At 56 Beevor has been a military man - three years in the late 60s with the 11th Hussars in Europe - and started his writing career with novels. He has been much more successful with his acclaimed histories and has recently been much in demand as a commentator about the war in Iraq, a role he accepts reluctantly.

Thank you for your time this morning, do you have a busy day ahead?

Yes I do, it's absolute chaos at the moment. At least people have finally woken up to the fact that Baghdad is not going to be Stalingrad. For the last 10 days it's been chaos. They talk about Saddamgrad, it's been ridiculous. The trouble with the press, at least in this country is having to make immediate links with something people recognise and Baghdad and Stalingrad both end with 'dad. It was amazing that everyone had to jump to the same thing. It started last September with the Financial Times which asked me to write an article, 3000 words, on why Baghdad was like Stalingrad and I said, 'It's not!' The irony of that is if anything it's going to be much closer to Berlin, purely with Saddam -- despite the irony that his great hero is Stalin -- is actually much more likely to finish off like Hitler in a bunker somewhere. But we will see.

I'd like to come back to that but first I'd like to talk with you about the Berlin book. It would seem to me Stalingrad is accepted as the turning point of the war for military historians such as yourself . . .

The psychological turning point. In geopolitical terms I think most historians now would accept it was Moscow in 194,1 but it wasn't that apparent at that stage even though America had come into the war. That was the the geopolitical turning point. but after Stalingrad every knew which way the war was going to go.

For you as a military historian and having investigated Stalingrad in the manner you did, I guess Berlin was the almost inevitable corollary?

It was, but I'd be the first to admit Stalingrad was not my idea, it was my editor who suggested it and I made desperate excuses to get out of the whole project because at that stage, and I'd worked in the Russian archives, I knew the sort of material I needed on Stalingrad. I had no way of knowing whether I'd ever get close to that sort of stuff. And I knew it meant spending months abroad and that sort of thing. But my literary agent kicked me hard under the table and said it was a brilliant idea. And when I got home my wife [historian Artemis Cooper] said I would be mad not to. But the point was that having started on the research on Stalingrad I suddenly realised how the material showing the fate of German prisoners at the end of the siege -- and I mention it in the introduction to Berlin where they are marched out and the elderly Russian officer shouts out pointing at the ruins around them, 'This is what Berlin is going to look like' - and then you knew from that moment that Berlin had to follow Stalingrad, the two cities were so closely linked in the Russian and German minds.

In terms of your research, and you mentioned that you had already used the Russian archives, do you feel that there was a window of opportunity there which has now being closed?

Yes, a window which has already started being closed. Fast.

I suspect some people might think you were responsible for that, given what you have written.

I can at least say this in my own defence - yes, there were rude remarks in an amusing way - but they actually started to close before Berlin came out and so there was no question that the row over Berlin had anything to do with it. Just after I'd finished the research I got a call from a Swedish historian who said did I realise the FSB, the new version of the KGB, was now checking on every file now taken out by a foreign historian. This was well before Berlin, and a few months later a historian from Bristol University I knew well rang to say not only were they checking on every file taken out by historians, they were co-ordinating it on a computer. And none of these archives actually have their own computer, there is just the one computer provided by the FSB for keeping track of foreign historians. So despite that period of great friendship after 9/11 between Putin and the West we're not actually seeing very much more.

Your book has been denounced, but has it actually been denied Russian authorities?

Oh God yes. The Russian ambassador [in London] accused me of lies, slander and blasphemy against the Red Army.

Yet you have the documents to prove it - although that has never troubled the Russians in the past, has it?

The documents come from a whole variety of areas, many of them from the Russian archives, which indicate the German estimates which were put together in the early 80s or so were for two million women [raped by invading Russian troops]. Although that sounds a very round number it breaks down in a reasonably orderly way if you do it region by region. If one takes East Prussia which is probably the worst, one goes through the accounts in the Russian archive, reports to Stalin from generals at the front, it shows hardly a woman escaped and also the numbers of women who were committing suicide as a result. But the most devastating of all from the Russian point of view which no Russian historian has mentioned - the trouble with Russian historians is they are all conventional and are part of the military set-up and work through the Ministry of Defense so are not going to rock many boats there, except for one or two fairly brave ones but the ones on the inside - they don't even like to acknowledge the fact that the Red Army was raping all the women [including those Russians] who had been taken back to slave labour by the Germans. And that is highly detailed in a report passed to Malenkov so there is nothing they can do about denying that

Let us talk about rape for a moment then. You offer a number of explanations such as the sexual repression in Russia of the period, the sheer frustration of the men and so on, but it was also used as a weapon of war against an enemy that had been demonised and dehumanised by Soviet propaganda. What do we learn from that, the unforseen dangers of demonising and dehumanising?

Absolutely, absolutely. The real dangers - which was seen both ways around, the dehumanising of the Slavs in the eyes of the Wehrmacht when they attacked, and the totalitarian regime when it comes the other way round where every German was by definition evil. Although they suddenly tried to change the party line towards the end because they realised this ws creating terrible resistance among the Germans who felt they had to fight to the end because they felt there wouldn't be anything worth living for afterwards. Stalin therefore changed the party line late in the day when he tried to say that Hitler's come and go but the German people will go on and not all of them were fascists. But it was a bit late after two or three years, since the autumn of 42 just before Stalingrad, when the violation of the Motherland propaganda began, and the revenge was inevitably going to be terrible and basically indiscriminate.

I believe in Germany there has been a great outpouring of sentiment since your book and people are now seeing that they too were victims and this was now being recognised.

Indeed. It actually started before my book came out with the Gunter Grass novel [Crab Walk] which is just about coming out in English now. Then it was accelerated dramatically in December last year with Jorg Friedrich's book Der Brand (The Burning) which is about the destruction of cities in Germany by the RAF and USAF. This has created a tremendous reaction that, 'We are victims too like other victims of Nazism'. That's fine and quite right because there's no way that the present generations should bear guilt for the war at all. I don't believe in the whole notion of collective guilt. It does not and should not exist in that sense.The only danger is if it is taken so far, particularly by the extreme Right, so that Germans see themselves as victims and forget about the victims of the Germans. The whole thing has got to be seen in context.

In that sense the new Right has got ammunition here.

Yes, it has. And this is why Gunter Grass is absolutely right when asked why he, a Leftist, should write about this particular subject and the fate of the refugees from East Prussia. He said if we don't face up to it the extreme right will exploit it. And he's absolutely right. The only danger, and this is well portrayed in Grass' novel, particularly at a time when Poland and Czechoslavakia want to join the European Union, one is getting a lot of tensions about remarks made in Germany about the suffering of Germans expelled from Czechoslavakia at the end of the war. The implication is that they should be allowed their land back. Plus of course of Poland, the whole of Silesia, Pomerania and so forth which all became part of Poland. Already now you have Germans going back and buying up the land which their families used to own and they are living there, sometimes in the old family schloss, amidst hostile Poles. It actually makes you think of illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank. It's a slightly worrying thing and I mustn't over-dramatize it, but put it this way: it is raising a number of anxieties and worries among the Polish population.

All we are saying then is there are changing perspectives on history and people will make up their own history depending on their perspective.

Absolutely, everyone has their own version of history, as we see now in the Der Brand debate. Some see the bombing of cities by the RAF and USAF as totally useless killing , the killing of civilians. But in fact there was a very strong military argument, which may sound cynical but was very effective, at the time and that was aside from the question of whether you were breaking civilian moral -- and I think on balance you probably weren't. But what they certainly managed to do, which the British knew only too well, was for the Germans to bring back their air support from the Russian front to defend the Reich. This helped the Russian advance in 43 and 44 enormously. The German's don't like to see that.

I was brought up seeing the war from a western perspective which was very different to how Russian students might have been taught it. It seemed that after the Battle of the Bulge there was a steady advance and appreciably less resistence than there was on the Eastern front. Was that because of the absolute fear of the Russians and that [the Germans] felt they had absolutely nothing left to lose?

In a way they knew they were doomed but they were terrified of Russian revenge, not surprisingly. What they failed to acknowledge was they had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of revenge and horror. Even Goebbels' horror propoganda, which was desperately exaggerated, by the end had become true. So they felt they had to hold on against the Russians hoping the British and Americans were going to get to Berlin first. There were incredible rumours running around Berlin during those last days. Housewives said they had heard planes flying over during the night but there were no bombs dropped so maybe they were dropping American paratroopers and so on. People were prepared to believe anything just to give themselves hope that it wasn't going to be the Russians moving down the street in a few days.

Yet it would seem the tactics were very different, Stalin's tactics were regardless of the cost to his own troops. I imagine then, and now, those kinds of casualties would have been unconscionable to western military strategists.

Indeed, but I don't think things have changed quite so much in the Russian army, think of the assault on Groznyy. I'm very glad in a way the Russians didn't join the coalition in Iraq because their tactics in street fighting are distinctly unsophisticated. The way they [British and American troops] have handled Basra has been very clever. It's the only way you can do it, to wear down resistence and cause a minimum number of casualtes and then move in suddenly.

Let us talk military strategy then. I understand towards the end Hitler was mad and obsessive, but was he ever a good military strategist, or early on was he just a gifted opportunist and expansionist politician?

Opportunist is spot on. Where he was clever was spotting - and this is earlier in the war, by the end of 42 he was useless although even in the summer of 42 he could spot a good opportunity which he would claim as his own and he was unscrupulous in that way. But he did have a good eye for opportunity at that stage, on the other hand had no sense of resupply or any of the logistical sides of warfare. He was a map general, an armchair general, a bunker general who had no idea of what it was really like at the front. He would say he didn't want to be bored by the details, but they were rather important when you were talking about Russia.

On the military side there were people like Guderian, and Zhokov on the other side, whose careers were defeated by their lack of the political cunning unlike their respective leaders.

Zhokov was not sort of defeated as such and he was certainly naive and thought Stalin had supported him all the way through. Stalin was terrified of generals, particularly one of Zhokov's popularity.

Those Stalinist machinations kicked in very quickly.

Oh God yes. You have to remember how paranoid he was as a result of 41. He felt that the British and Americans, after the shock he'd had in 41 where he'd completely misjudged Hitler and was determined that would never happen again, that was partly his obsession about Poland. He loathed the Poles anyway but one of the reasons for his obsession with Poland was to be absolutely certain to have that cordon sanitaire to be absolutely certain there would not be a surprise attack again.

At the end of the war there was also an immediate denial of culpability on the part of many Germans, even those involved in the war and its atrocities, that if things had gone slightly differently it would all have been viewed differently. Does that surprise you, the degree of denial?

No. There is always this very curious confusion in the German mind, and it's not just to do with Nazism. It's the confusion of cause and effect. They could not, or were incapable of seeing, that the defeat of Germany and the way communism was brought to the centre of Europe was a direct result of their invasion [of Russia]. So they had to persuade themselves that it was a necessary pre-emptive strike [on Russia] because Stalin was always going to invade Europe and all the rest of it. So there is a deliberate subconscious confusion of thought processes. So it didn't surprise me, but I found it very very striking in these reports.

So those people genuinely believe that?

Oh yes, absolutely. They have convinced themselves to believe it. I mean in way that's not surprising because how else would they have been able to live with themselves? The human mind has infinite capacity and strategies for making it possible to live with very uncomfortable truths.

In terms of where you stand in the art and craft of being a military historian, are we better off these days as we have more access to information and we won't have to wait 60 years to find out certain things? Or do you feel that even now there is a closed-shop of information, even in Iraq where it would seem we are being inundated with information from all sides?

I would hate to write the history of this war because I don't know whether one will ever get a full picture of the intelligence build-up. The trouble is so much is purely on electronic data bases which are not like archives where papers are preserved for posterity. Electronic data bases will simply not be.The other problem is the information overload that even intelligence services have problems. This was the problem with 9/11 and in Vietnam even, the information overload of intelligence gathering through computers. It is probably going to get worse, so how any historian is going to understand the background to the war and get the intelligence picture I simply don't know. For a war like this it's vital.

It seems ironic that this war s the most televised since Vietnam but has been, at least from the western perspective, been more sanitised than any. It's a war without dead bodies on screen.

Yes, but if you'd been watching al-Jazeera there were a lot more there. But no, there are not a lot being seen, not as many as there are obviously.

As that relates to your style then: people have commented on your cinematic style, you let people see the bodies. You started your writing career with fiction and I'm wondering if you bring something of that eye to it.

I don't think that's deliberate, it's much more how my attitudes to military history developed. I always loathed the way it was written in the old fashioned sense which was usually retired colonels and generals who always made it sound like a well-ordered chess game, which you knew was rubbish.

I studied under John Keegan at Sandhurst and was very influenced by his later book, The Face of Battle, and realised that pointed a direction. And that one had to reverse this ridiculous chessboard version. But then there was that phase of aural history which became very fashionable. But I realised that wasn't right either. I realised the only way was to involve the two and it is cinematic in a way because it involves cutting to show the direct consequences of Stalin or Hitler's decisions on the soldiers and the civilians in the field. And to do that you need to cut from one to the other using archive material with contemporary accounts and war diaries, private diaries and letters and so forth. You can actually then make a composite picture of both sides and at both levels. You get history from above combined with history from below and that combination gives a novelistic impression. Whether my writing of fiction entered it or not I have no idea. I think it did a but it wasn't conscious in any way. I thoroughly disliked the idea of a semi-fictionalised version of history which some American journalists write, which is them inventing dialogue. Any of the dialogue in my book comes from historical sources, whether that is dead accurate or not depends very much on the person who wrote it down at the time. With the Russians some of their personal accounts are almost entirely dialogue and so you are extremely sceptical. But some of the dialogue of used between Zhukov and Stalin, all those marshals noted it down afterwards very carefully because these conversations with Stalin were so important they would have noted them down and so are based on valid accounts.

I am obliged to ask you this because people say if we don't learn from history we are condemned to repeat it. But given what is happening in Baghdad right now, is what we learn by studying military history that we just do keep making the same mistakes no matter how much we study and try to learn.

Yes and no. In many ways this is an ill-considered war but I don't think this was because people were following earlier mistakes. On the whole the way the war has been fought they have certainly avoided previous mistakes, certainly in terms of street fighting. The lessons of Stalingrad and Berlin, of trying to force in immediately with troops from all direction they have realised is a huge error. There is no doubt all the generals out there had been studying Stalingrad, Berlin and probably Groznyy too as the example of what not to do in street fighting.

In that regard are we moving to a time when if wars are fought there will be fewer people killed because there will be more accuracy, more caution?

Not surprisingly because of the political and international repercussions, they have got to be extremely careful about accuracy because of the lethality of the weapons involved. One of the biggest dangers to our troops is friendly fire, it's not the enemy.

Just one last thing then, you do say people today cannot know the horror of all this unless they were there. Do you think this is the importance of a military historian, to be witness?

Absolutely, because we live in an almost post-military age. Okay, we are getting a lot of military stuff on the box now but only a tiny minority of the country has any idea of what military service involves and is about, and what life is like in an army, in comparison with their father's and grandfathers' generation where there was conscription and military service. One of the reasons why the young are so fascinated by military history is because they are living in a society where there is health and safety at work, and everything from food poisoning to sport is regulated. They are fascinated by a period where individuals had no control over their own fate and were caught up in appalling maelstrom and wonder whether they would have survived and whether they would have had to courage to refuse to shoot prisoners if ordered to. In a way it does intrigue them and this is why the duty of the historian is to understand and explain and describe. It's not to lecture and any moral judgements should be made by the reader. One has to present the true consequences and horrors of war in the way that they were. The trouble today in an increasingly politically correct world is the idea that you try to impose the values and attitudes of today on previous periods, and that's madness. You can't judge Stalingrad in politically correct terms.

So what is the obligation on the military, because you were a military man yourself. Did they tell you the truth about war? Because I look at what young American men and women are saying now in Iraq, that they weren't told it would be like this. They thought they were going to be met with sweets and flowers.

They certainly had been misinformed in that sense. I think there were major faults on intelligence assessment before the war began and it's very unwise to tell troops that. In fact they are starting to be greeted like that in some places, but the leaders of the coalition completely underestimated the effect of 91 on the Iraqis when they felt let down and, not surprisingly, betrayed, and being told to rise up and then recieve no support whatsoever. That was outrageous.

One last one, what are you working on now?

Basically the next big one is going to be D-Day but there are a couple of small projects before then. D-Day is the last big one because that is the prequel to Paris: After the Liberation which I co-wrote with my wife. It's actually an important and relevant subject today from the point of view of looking at the French and American relationship, and that of the United States and Europe. It all began then.

When you do that book that greater movement of history which started then is in the back of your mind?

Oh yes, we were very conscious of it working on the Paris book because that was one the great tensions of that period which developed and that ran all the way through until 68 and is coming out again in different ways later. No country loves their liberator I'm afraid.

Why is that?

Usually the sense of humiliation. There are exceptions of course, the liberation of Brussels was wildly enthusiastic and the Dutch too. But in the case of France where the humiliation of 1940 had gone so deep the notion that the British and the Americans, both countries to which they had fairly ambivalent feelings already to say the least, had been their liberators stuck in French throats in a big way.

And that is going to happen in Iraq, because these people don't seem overly keen on the Americans.

Yes, I think that's a distinct possibility. My feelings are more that once you've stripped away the straitjacket of a dictatorship then you are going to get, rather as we found in Yugoslavia, you've got all the different warring factions: the Suni's,the Kurds and so forth. It's a fairly similar pattern to Yugoslavia in many ways.

You think people have underestimated the potential for civil war?

Exactly. So much of it will depend on the federal constitution they can come up with, but there are splits even within the Kurds themselves. That is something we will just have to wait and watch.

* Beevor spoke to Reid on the morning of Monday April 7 as American tanks rolled into Baghdad.

The inevitable end

Herald Feature: Iraq war