By Phil Shannon
Was World War II the continuation of World War I, i.e. an imperialist war that the international working class should have opposed? Or was World War II an anti-fascist war that everybody in the Allied countries should have supported?
The mainstream view of politicians, Labor and Liberal, tends to be the latter. For the revolutionary left it tends to be the former. How are we to assess these views?
The theoretical stance of the respected Trotskyist, Ernest Mandel, is representative of the strengths, and weaknesses, of the revolutionary left view of World War II. Mandel believes that "the meaning of the Second World War, like that of its predecessor, can be grasped only in the context of the imperialist drive for world domination" (The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, 1986).
Thus defined, World War II, from the perspective of the working class in the non-occupied Allied countries like England, the US and Australia, can not be seen as a "just war" which "should have been fought, and which revolutionaries supported then as they do now". German, Italian and Japanese imperialism was, according to Mandel's argument, no worse than that of the Allied states and therefore the "anti-fascist alliance" of the working class and the ruling class in the Allied countries amounted to no more than "systematic class collaboration".
This basic argument is supported with the abundant evidence of the duplicity and hypocrisy of the Allies. Before the war, for example, Allied politicians such as Churchill and Menzies admired Mussolini and Hitler for repressing their labour movements, whilst the Allies failed to fight Franco in Spain.
During the war, US car, oil and other business interests continued business arrangements with Nazi Germany. The Allies delayed opening the second (Western) front so that Germany and Russia would exhaust each other, thus inflicting immense hardship on the Russian people. The opening of the Second Front with the D-Day landings in Normandy was timed to prevent the popular, anti-fascist and socialist resistance movements from taking power in France, Italy, Greece and elsewhere in Europe. The Allies refused to bomb the rail systems transporting Jews to mass slaughter.
After the war, the Allies continued to oppose, disarm and fight these indigenous liberation forces, and they fought against the national independence movements in the colonised countries.
England, for example, fought the nationalists in India and armed the defeated Japanese in Vietnam to counter the Viet Minh liberation forces. The US kept the quisling French fascist officials in power in "liberated" Algeria, and in Italy it armed the defeated Germans to hold out against the Italian resistance until US forces arrived.
The threat of socialism, of real freedom and democracy, was now more of a worry to the Allied capitalist classes than the nearly defeated rival fascist imperialisms.
To the extent that the political goals and military strategies of World War II were determined by the ruling classes of all
belligerent countries, the war was unavoidably going to possess the character of imperialist rivalry.
Allied politicians' hand-on-heart professions of anti-fascist ardour were hollow. What drove the US to war with Japan was Japan's imperialist gains in Manchuria and China, and Japanese designs on South-East Asia.
Pearl Harbour was the trigger for US and Japanese imperialist interests in the Pacific to explode militarily. There is some evidence that the US had advance warning of the Japanese attack and dispatched its most modern ships to sea, leaving obsolete junk to be bombed, in order to provide a pretext to enter the war. Making the world "safe for democracy and freedom" meant, for the US capitalist class, ensuring the freedom for US capital to exploit overseas.
What concerned England's rulers was not fascist tyranny or the crushing of the labour movement in Germany (which they envied), but the challenge to their own imperialist interests posed by the German conquest of Europe and the resultant threat to England's colonial empire.
The English Navy spent most of its time in the Mediterranean to protect its colony of Egypt and its Middle East oil supplies and profits. English rulers were worried by German plans to move into English and other Allied territory. As early as 1940, plans had been drawn up by the Nazis for the conquest of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, the Azores and West Africa, Iran and Iraq, and even Australia.
As Goebbels understood the "world mission" of the Nazis, it "does not consist in extending culture and education throughout the world, but in taking wheat and oil away". US and English imperialism had these same goals, however, and thus a military clash was inevitable between all the imperialist contenders once Germany, Italy and Japan had fired the first shots in the war.
The imperialist nature of the war is a reality as much as "the spirit of Dunkirk" or the "rats of Tobruk" or any other icons of the war. Nevertheless, in the historical scales, the anti-
fascist character of the war is politically decisive. Whatever the material interests and private motives of the Allied ruling classes during the war, they had, in practical military terms, to defeat two countries which were fascist or, in the case of the authoritarian-militarist Japan, allied to its fascist partners.
When the reality of fascism is factored in, the conclusion that World War II was just another imperialist scrap needs major reassessment.
The conflict between fascism and the capitalist democracies was of crucial importance to the international working class. If the working class in the Allied countries had not supported the Allied war effort, fascism would have been triumphant globally, and the labour movement and the prospects for socialism would have been crushed worldwide. Nazism was not only just another imperialism like the British or US but the most thoroughgoing attack on all the freedoms, real and partial, that the working class possessed in the capitalist democracies — trade unions, independent working class political activity, some freedoms of association and expression, etc.
Mandel is orthodox, and wrong, to claim, with Trotsky, that World War II was simply another manifestation of "the structurally barbaric nature of imperialism", not influenced politically by "any particular political form of the bourgeois state or any particular national ruling class". There was the world of difference, for the prospects of working-class organisation, between a fascist state and a capitalist state. The Churchills and Roosevelts were committed anti-working class rulers but they were not Nazis.
The practical choice for the working class and the left in countries like Australia which were not occupied by fascist armies was between capitalist democracy and fascism. To have allowed Germany, Italy and Japan to take over significant parts of the world would have been to allow fascism to grow stronger economically and militarily, and invite further imperialist encroachments of fascism. Japan, for example, might have eventually invaded Australia (a goal which featured in its early planning documents, and which Broome and Darwin experienced with air attacks during the war), in which case the trade union rights and working class freedoms of Australian workers would have been snuffed out.
Trotsky himself, just before his assassination, was considering the idea of the need to resist fascism, in alliance with a bourgeois democratic state. Trotsky had previously been expounding the policy of "revolutionary defeatism" (as Marxists had done during World War I), which proposed that the task of the working class was not to defend any one imperialist "fatherland", whether democratic or fascist, but to turn the war into socialist revolution.
Now, in 1940, however, with much of mainland Europe under Nazi domination, Trotsky was beginning to change his strategic outlook. He still maintained that World War II was a "continuation" of World War I, but he believed that "continuation" does not necessarily mean "mere repetition" and that "defence of the bourgeois fatherland" may be justified in certain political conditions (Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940, Oxford University Press, pp. 501-502.. Trotsky was also now supporting military conscription of US workers. These last speculative words of Trotsky suggest a major change in orthodox revolutionary thinking on World War II.
The working class, politicised during the Depression, were aware of what fascism meant for them and the need to politically support the war. There was no mass opposition to World War II as there was to World War I, and not simply because the major left force in the labour movement, the Communist parties, supported the war. A tank commander during the Italian campaigns of 1943-45, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson later recalled, "I hold the now unfashionable view that the last war was, for the Allied Armies and the Resistance, an anti-Fascist war, not only in the rhetoric but also in the intentions of the dead".
This political, class-based view was often manipulated, coopted and betrayed by ruling-class propaganda, which promoted nationalist themes of revenge and racism. In England, hatred of the Luftwaffe's blitz and fear of German invasion were manipulated to foster anti-German feeling and support for the reactionary Tory Churchill. Anti-Japanese racism reached disgusting depths in the US and Australia. This, however, does not negate the anti-fascist consciousness amongst the working class that did exist.
Many Allied war crimes were committed in the name of Western civilisation — the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan was a few months short of military defeat, the fire-bombing raids on Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, the refusal to take prisoners in the bitter island war in the Pacific (on Okinawa, 50,000 Japanese soldiers were killed and only 227 prisoners were taken by the US forces).
For all that (with the exception of the nuclear bombing of Japan), the Axis atrocities were of a special caste, which reflects some difference between the political cultures of fascist and bourgeois societies. The Holocaust is the prime example of utter barbarity, but there were many examples of brutality.
Unit 731, run by the Japanese military in Manchuria, practised human experimentation including deliberately freezing people to death, infecting them with plague and other diseases, and using them as subjects for vivisection. The German Nazis' treatment of prisoners of war was inhuman — 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs in Germany died. Japanese treatment of POWs, the Chinese and other non-Japanese Asian peoples was appallingly cruel.
The list of atrocities is so long, and the sheer scale of human destruction so great (80 million dead, half of whom were civilians compared to World War I, where only 10% were non-
combatant casualties) because fascism came to power. Once established in Germany, the cost of defeating fascism militarily was always going to be huge. It would have been better to defeat fascism politically before it took state power, but that option was closed in the face of the Luftwaffe, Panzer tanks and U-boats.
World War II was a contradictory phenomenon. The ruling class and the working class were united on the need to defeat three countries that were fascist but the motives were based on different class grounds. For the working class, the threat of fascism was paramount. The capitalist class, however, was moved by reactionary nationalist grounds — the three Axis states were only incidentally fascist. This different outlook underlay many of the contradictions of the war which rightly give rise to the ambivalence so many on the left feel about World War II.
Despite the different, and contradictory, class motives, the war remained a necessary one for the working class. Proponents of World War II as just another imperialist war usually pass over what the left and the working class in the Allied countries should have done about the war. Mandel approves of both the armed partisan resistance movements in occupied countries and the Trotskyists who attempted to fraternise instead of shoot individual German soldiers in the occupied countries, but is silent on the role of the working class in the non-occupied Allied countries, implying they should have stayed out of it.
However, it was the responsibility of the left in the Allied countries to seize on the class contradictions of the war and push for an armed struggle against fascism, at the same time arguing that a thorough working-class victory could be won only if they pursued domestic class struggle as well.
The Western Communist parties, however, were under the malign influence of Stalin, who sought a compromise with Allied imperialism in order to preserve the Soviet Union's own empire and the Soviet bureaucracy's hold on power. These Communist parties were wrong to support the Allied war effort at the expense of the interests of the working class in the Allied countries, but this is a reflection of the counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist version of "communism" that reigned in Moscow rather than a refutation of the need for a joint military anti-fascist and political anti-capitalist struggle.
In this 50th year since the end of World War II, the left has a duty to highlight the imperialist nature of the war and the hypocrisy of the self-interested capitalist classes of the Allied states — features of the war which have been ignored or suppressed by our business and political leaders. It was, however, right to fight. Above all, the barbarism of World War II should remind us of the need to ensure that fascism should never be allowed to happen again if we want to avoid the costs of defeating it on the battlefield.