Moral Combat

Moral reflection without moralizing

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Moral Combat by Michael Burleigh

This book is an overview of the entirety of World War II by way of its darkest moments. Burleigh takes the reader on a Cook's tour of World War II from pre-war appeasement to the nuclear bombings of Japan. Burleigh connects these points with an informed and reasoned discussion of the morally problematic events of the war. So, we don't get battles as such, but we get occupations and the killing of civilians, and the Holocaust, and collaborationists and resistance, and the Allied campaign of bombing civilians in Germany and Japan.

In discussing these matters, Burleigh informs the reader of the material facts and offers context and insights gleaned from his reflections. He is not doing moral philosophy. Frankly, he seems to have little patience with moral philosophers, particularly moral philosophers who equate the Nazi death camps with Allied air raids on German cities, noting that while the death camps murdered defenseless non-combatants, Allied airmen were losing their lives to German fighters, anti-aircraft fire and civilian lynch mobs.

I listened to this as an audiobook. I found the narration and writing to be excellent. Burleigh is a witty, stylish prose writer and some of his observations are well-worth noting:

“The Communist International (Comintern), so successful in recruiting spies among the privileged elites of the West, was not a vehicle of international revolution but a subsidiary instrument of Soviet foreign policy, whose line was set by Moscow. One year social democrats were ‘social Fascists', the next they were allies in anti-Fascist Popular Fronts. Self-denial was a Communist virtue, and a number of Western intellectuals, like G. D. H. Cole and Eric Hobsbawm, found a strange fulfilment in suppressing their individuality in its service. All of which is to say that Communism had a network of strategically positioned apologists and supporters in place long after Nazism was vanquished.”

I found Burleigh's contextualization of events to be realistic and intelligent. In reading on the moralistic condemnations of Pius XII for his purported “silence,” I found Burleigh's response to a similar condemnation of Churchill to be apt:

“It is also easy to decontextualise these killings from a particularly desperate time in the Allied war effort. Many Jewish historians are exercised by the fact that in this broadcast Churchill did not specifically mention that most of the Nazis victims were Jews, or that in the midst of a global war in which the fate of Britain hung in the balance his attention to the dire circumstances of foreign Jews was intermittent. The broadcast had multiple agendas. It was a celebration of the unity of the English-speaking peoples, one alone (the US) being still at peace, while Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand were at war, and it was an effort to rally British support for the Soviet Union, which itself did not regard the Jews as exceptionally victimised amid the murderous Nazi onslaught. The object of his broadcast was essentially political, directed at the Soviet Union as much as the British people, at a time when the latter were enduring a nightly rain of German bombs while the former were facing annihilation at the hands of the Wehrmacht. It seems doubtful whether the Soviets would have appreciated hearing that the Jews were the principal victims of Nazism when they were losing millions of soldiers. Churchill also mentioned every country in Nazi-occupied Europe, hoping to stimulate resistance.4”

Pius is likewise blamed for not mentioning Jews explicitly, but this seems like a point that could only have been made decades after the fact. At the time, Jews were one group among many that were suffering Nazi barbarism. Today, we tend to lose sight of the tremendous suffering of Poles and Ukrainians and other groups.

Similarly, efforts to depict the morally problematic Allied bombings of German cities as on a par with Nazi death camps miss the fact that Allied bombers were taking great risks and seeking to end the war sooner with equipment that was inherently inaccurate. Apparently, only 20% of bombs landed within 5 miles of their target.

Burleigh seems to give the Allied bombing campaign a pass on pragmatic grounds. Burleigh's position is based on a recognition that Nazi Germany was so monstrous that simply ending its existence sooner justified actions that might be war crimes if the Allies lost. Burleigh has a point; the war was not simply between Team A and Team B, but between forces that were monstrous and nations that represented mankind's best hopes.

The nuclear attacks on Japan get a similar treatment. Although there was a fig leaf of a military target, in fact, these were attacks on defenseless civilian populations. The only justification for the bombings is that they were the only way of using nuclear weapons that were likely to work. Burleigh's discussion of the considerations that went into the use of the nuclear bombs is highly informative.

This book is not intended as a work of philosophy, but it provides the raw material for moral reflection. It was very interesting. Burleigh is an intelligent and reasonable guide into the thickets of human barbarity.