Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

By Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster

The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle
- Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues”

War should be conducted like a funeral ceremony.
- Tao Te Ching

No hype: Every person on the planet who reads English should buy, beg, or borrow a copy of Human Smoke, take three days off work (or whatever else they happen to be doing), sit down, and read it straight through, cover-to-cover. This book should be translated into every other written language on Earth and be read by all the rest of the people in the world. Those who can’t read should have it read to them by those who can.

This should happen because Human Smoke is a work of great art and courage and history. It is impeccably and exhaustively researched. It is concisely and powerfully written. It is superbly and unusually structured. It is a great prose poem, perhaps the best ever written. It collages one passage against another — thereby drawing amazing parallels — that you will hardly believe. It tells of moments of great kindness and valor by nobodies and acts of great cruelty and murder by famous men. It also chronicles acts of kindness by famous men and acts of unspeakable horror by nobodies. It introduces you to people you will come to admire, though you have never heard of them, and thus rescues them from the oblivion of official history. Most of all: This book will change your mind in ways you never thought possible. There may be no better work of non-fiction in existence about World War II than Human Smoke, yet it ends on December 31, 1941.

Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the story goes, are the great hero leaders of the Second World War, a war that dragged on for six years, ending in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and claiming the lives of 60 million people. The Western democracies were forced to fight to preserve freedom. While it is true that the imposition upon Germany of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI was a major factor in WWII, this pales when faced with the pit-bull, universal vileness of the enemy; his refusal to surrender, his cruel, brutal, uncivilized ways, extended the war. The Western democracies were beyond doubt the white hats, the civilized ones, the ones who cared about the Jews. They didn’t want war. They were even naïve about Germany’s intentions — and Japan’s. Especially Japan’s. And Roosevelt especially was naïve. Yet when it came, the Western democracies fought, reluctant at first though they may have been. World War II is the war of The Greatest Generation.

Right? Wrong. Except for the Treaty of Versailles, the Japanese cities, and the 60 million people.

Human Smoke is structured in shards, small pieces of information, stories, incidents, and quotations by the famous, the not-so-famous, and the obscure and ordinary. There is not a single passage longer than a page or two. Sometimes there are three or four entries on a page, each entry separated by a generous amount of white space. Many “leaders” hoist themselves on their own petards in these passages. Many who prosecuted the war on the Allied side reveal themselves to be pathological liars who condoned mass murder, every bit the homicidal equal of the German lunatics and the Japanese militarists.

We are used to the infamous of World War II: Hitler, Mussolini, Goering, Goebbels, Stalin, Tojo, Eichmann, Mengele. No surprise there, and they deserve every disgrace history heaps upon them. But it is Churchill and Roosevelt whose reputations suffer due to the revelations about them in Human Smoke. This is going to make some people unhappy, in part because they are supposed to be the protagonists of our victorious story. But this is not just a matter of balance, of seeing the whole picture. No one who reads this book will ever think of these two men in the same way again.

The British prime minister is revealed to be a megalomaniac, a man who could proffer oracular, calculated phrases (“We shall fight them on the beaches…”) to stir his citizens into continuing a war that might have been stopped by 1940 or 1941, if he had cared to try. The Germans, by this time, were already suffering food shortages and doubts about winning the war were circulating; the German General Staff itself had dug in its heels about going to war in the first place. But Churchill, who had once lamented the fact that the First World War ended too soon, didn’t want to try.

The prime minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, was in London in 1940 and met Churchill. His two-word comment on the English PM says it all: “Enjoys war.” The Nazis were mean bloodthirsty bastards. Yes? Of course. They were the ones who cruelly bombed undefended civilian populations from the air. Right? Yes. But only in response to Churchill’s order for the night-time bombing of German cities. It was Churchill who first ordered this kind of total air war against essentially undefended civilian populations. The result was that the resistance of ordinary Germans stiffened toward the Allies. In addition, so many private dwellings in Germany were destroyed due to the bombing that the many Jews who still lived in German cities (yes, that’s true) were forced out of their homes and into the streets so that “Aryans” could have a place to live. This refugee situation resulted in millions of Jews being first sent to Poland and then, and only then, in 1942, the gradual development of the “Final Solution.” In other words, it can be said that Churchill’s refusal to try to stop the war early when it might have been stopped, and his civilian bombing campaign, contributed significantly to the Holocaust.

Furthermore, it was Churchill who ordered the British naval blockade of Europe that resulted in the unnecessary starvation deaths of women, children, and the elderly. These were people whose countries were on the Allied side, but German-occupied (France, Greece). Many people of goodwill tried to have boatloads of food sent across the blockade to feed these people. Churchill refused to ease the blockade. He also failed to notify the city of Coventry that intelligence had intercepted German communiqués saying the city would be bombed. The dead of Coventry were buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers, and the Gothic cathedral there, one of the finest in England, and all Europe, was left in ruins. Churchill, however, had his propaganda victory.

The Prime Minister’s tenor may be further judged by the fact that he despised Gandhi’s pacifism; had Nehru sentenced to four years of hard labor for speaking out in favour of peace in the world; ordered a group of men to fight to the death at Calais so that the evacuation of Dunkirk might possibly be helped; and, prior to the war, had said good things and published glowing accounts of Hitler and Mussolini. During the war, he badgered companies to speed up the development and production of gas and germ warfare weapons. It so happened that one of The Right Honourable Mr. Churchill’s investment advisors was Harry McGowan, deputy chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, a company that developed and manufactured gunpowder, bombs, ammunition, TNT, and poison gas. The Prime Minister, one could say, was a war profiteer. And, oh yes, he commanded the British to fight at Falloujah, in Iraq, and had the Iraqi prime minister, Rashid Ali, deposed in order to protect British oil interests. Sound familiar?

And Mr. Roosevelt. What of him? The man who still has a special place in many American hearts. The man responsible for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), for bringing the full weight of the federal government to bear to help common Americans who suffered during the Depression - a man loathed by the right wing, even now.

In 1922, Mr. Roosevelt noticed that there were too many Jews in the law program at Harvard and helped get a quota instituted that severely cut back Jewish numbers. His wife, Eleanor, a liberal and feminist darling, wasn’t much on Jews herself. Neither was Neville Chamberlain, the U.K. Prime Minister in 1939; nor, apparently, anyone of an official capacity in the Western world who wasn’t Jewish - except for the people in the various peace movements, who cared about everyone.

Speaking of Harvard, its president, James Conant, had once said, in support of the U.S. selling arms to Britain for the Lend-Lease Act, that “…we must lay the moral, intellectual, and spiritual foundations for the kind of world we want….” The same Mr. Conant helped developed a poisonous gas in WWI; in the run-up to WWII he was not just Harvard’s president, he was in charge of a division of national defense that covered bombs, gases, and chemicals. The connections between universities and war in this country are long and deep.

But to Mr. Roosevelt, whose hobby was stamp collecting, and the U.S. Navy; he was taken by surprise on the “day that will live in infamy,” December 7, 1941, as was everyone else in the world. Except the Japanese, of course; those evil Asians who had launched this sneak attack, which was entirely unprovoked. Yes?

As Mr. Baker clearly demonstrates in Human Smoke, Roosevelt was talking about war with Japan as early as 1936. He made American military aircraft available to the Chinese, who were fighting the Japanese - a provocation because it violated neutrality laws. He authorized the sale of thousands of gallons of high-octane aviation fuel to the Chinese — the fuel tanker passed right by Japan on its way to Vladivostok to unload, a fact the Japanese were well aware of and protested. FDR instituted a draft in 1940 when the U.S. was not at war, and he left the U.S. Pacific fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor for a year, despite protestations by one of the fleet’s admirals (the admiral was reassigned). The home port of the fleet was San Diego. That’s where it ought to have anchored. Roosevelt’s decision was not just a major provocation to the Japanese. It allowed — that is not too strong a characterization — the fleet to be sitting ducks in an aerial attack. Two thousand American seamen died at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt finally had his excuse to declare war.

The first casualty of war is truth, goes the saying. That maxim is verified over and over again in this book. The next and continuing casualty of war — in a thousand thousand different subtle and obvious ways — is civilization itself. There is no hyperbole meant in the subtitle of Baker’s book. Delicacies of thought, action, and tolerance; delicacies of women’s feelings and relations; the flourishing of the arts: All are possible only in the context of peace. All are trampled upon, mocked, dispensed with in times of war. Men (and that’s mostly meant in the specific sense of gender, though crimes against humanity are committed by women, too) become barbarians: rape, torture, casual murder, mass slaughter, destruction of priceless human culture — it all occurs, and is almost always excused, in the name of war.

Returning to a civilized frame of mind, a civilized state of affairs, is not easy after a war, for such a world is created slowly, incrementally, and the minds of those who might create it have now been brutalized and militarized by the very expediency that claimed to save civilization. War, all wars, are lies. And they create monstrous military organizations that then have a self-perpetuating claim to existence. Beyond war’s immediate cruelties and stupidities, its waste of people and resources, its pollution of the environment, war does not do what it claims to want to do. War does not increase freedom, but constrains it, as much for the conquerors as for the conquered. The U.S. has now been at war, or in war readiness, for 70 years. Is the country freer for it? Are the people happier? More prosperous? More peaceful? More content? Are their resources being well used?

This sounds bleak, very bleak. Well, yes, but Baker’s book is a triumph. It shows us definitively that war is never the answer, even our favorite war. Here’s the big secret: There is no 'us' and 'them'. War is the enemy.

Finally, Human Smoke does us a great favor by introducing, or re-introducing, to us a different group of heroes than the ones the education system teaches us to admire, people who never surrendered to the fever of war, but who kept speaking out in favor of peace or, at the very least, for civilized behavior. Some of these you will know — Gandhi, Christopher Isherwood, Stefan Zweig — but there are many other people, and organizations, that should never be forgotten: Clarence Pickett, Albert Herling, John Haynes Holmes, Toyohiko Kagawa, Leo Stern, the Society of Friends (Quakers), Mihail Sebastian, Muriel Lester, American Mothers, Frances Partridge, Vera Brittain, Jeannette Rankin, Felix Kersten, Donald Benedict, Franz Halder, Rhys Davies, General Johannes Blaskowitz, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Dorothy Day, Dorothy Detzer, Norman Thomas (leader of the American Socialist party), Mothers of the USA, Harold Schoenfeld, the Reverend Harry Fosdick, Victor Klemperer, the Union Eight, Bernard Lichtenberg, General Helmuth Groscurth, I.F Stone (the journalist), and so on. You will meet them all in Human Smoke, women and men you can cherish. There are, be it noted, a couple of German generals in that list.

There can be no choosing among these extraordinary, brave souls, but one example: Jeanette Rankin, the Congressional representative from Montana. She was a pacifist who had ceaselessly spoken in favor of peace as the drums of war rolled and roared in the Thirties. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, she tried to speak out on the floor. Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, ignored her. Some one yelled out that the Japanese really had bombed the U.S. fleet.

“Killing more people, she replied, “won’t help matters.”

She was pressured to make the vote for war against Japan unanimous.

When her call came, she voted no.

She was the only person in the House to do so.

There are a number of illustrious pro-peace, anti-war narratives: Catch-22, All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grande Illusion, Paths of Glory, and Casualties of War. Put Human Smoke among them.

Review by Neil Flowers

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Human Smoke