V for Victory

I just finished Max Gallo’s outstanding five-volume history of World War II (spoiler alert – the Allies win.)

My friends Marjorie and Antoine gave me the first volume last summer and at first I wasn’t sure it would be all that interesting.  I mean, I already know a lot about the war.  When I was a kid I never missed an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.  And I saw the movie Patton twice. So what was there to learn?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. 

Probably the most interesting thing was how parochial everyone’s view of the war is.  I have a parochial American view.  When I think of WWII in Europe, I think of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge and things like that.  Ok, and maybe a little bit of the war in North Africa and the Lend-Lease program.  But for the most part, the European war began with the Normandy invasion and the Americans were the heroes.

Well, that’s not quite the whole story.

The European land war was mostly about the Eastern Front, the savage battles between Germany and the Soviet Union.  More than two-thirds of German war casualties were due to the Soviets.  And the Soviet Union lost far more soldiers and civilians than any other country. 

I don’t want to minimize America’s war contributions – they were enormous and decisive.  But so were those of the Soviet Union, and I didn’t have an appreciation for that before reading these books.

By the same token, Gallo’s books take a French perspective and so the Pacific war gets short shrift, just a handful of pages.  Again, a parochial viewpoint, but this time it is a French one.  I wonder how Russian and British textbooks treat the war.

Another really interesting thing was all of the political maneuvering by and around Charles de Gaulle. He was by no means the only French leader in WWII and it was not at all clear that he would emerge on top.  For a long time both Churchill and Roosevelt favored General Giraud, remember him?  They didn’t really trust de Gaulle.

In fact, de Gaulle seems to have had a talent for pissing people off.  And there was a real fear that he wanted to install himself as dictator after the war.   He was arrogant and authoritarian (bonapartiste is a description still used to describe him) but perhaps you have to be like that to accomplish the many things that he did under such difficult circumstances.  He is not a beloved figure today but he is deeply respected.

Anyway, after that much heavy history reading, I think I’ll move to something lighter.  Maybe a bit of Molière?

KVS