Re: 303 Squadron Battle Of Britain-HOODLUM License Key
Toccara Delacerda
In Australian popular memory the First World War is commonly seen as being futile; it is depicted as 'someone else's war', in which Australians became involved not because their national interests were at stake but because Australians were uncritically and emotionally attached to the British empire. This view has been challenged in recent years by historians such as John Moses, but nonetheless remains pervasive.
In August 1994 the Australian War Memorial and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University convened a seminar to re-examine this issue: was Australia's involvement in the First World War right, necessary and worthwhile? And what were the costs and benefits of this involvement? This book is a lightly edited version of the proceedings of the seminar. Conference proceedings are always a smorgasbord, but this one is more so than usual. Almost all the papers make good reading, but sometimes their relevance to the themes set out in Ken Inglis' introduction seems tenuous.
Bill Gammage opens the collection arguing, as one would expect from the author of The broken years, that the war should not have been fought. Nor should Australia have fought in it. In Gammage's view, the war cannot be construed as being fought for liberal democracy (as Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior argue later in the volume); rather it was fought for national interests in Europe. Australia's national survival was not at stake. Germany had no chance of winning a world war, nor of launching a successful occupation of Australia. But Gammage overlooks the fact, pointed out by Barry Smith in a later chapter, that the German navy had the capacity and the bases in the south-west Pacific to interdict Australian lines of communication, thus disrupting its trade and compromising its political autonomy. Gammage also weakens his argument by recycling the discredited 'lost generation' thesis; namely, that the low calibre of Australia's leaders in the 1920s was attributable to the losses of the war. As the British historian David Cannadine has pointed out, the men who died in the war of 1914-18 were too young to occupy positions of political leadership until the 1940s or 1950s.
Judith Smart's contribution is a long one (nearly 50 pages), which rather unbalances the collection. Her argument that the war stultified the pre-1914 momentum for a new social order is well-sustained, though much of the detail she includes about the morally and politically coercive regime which the war generated is familiar.
Jock Phillips offers an interesting analysis of the war from the New Zealand perspective, demonstrating how remarkably similar was the experience of the two Dominions. (One notable difference was the opposition to the war on the part of certain Maori groups who had suffered confiscation of their land.) Both in their imperial nationalism and their diffidence about pursuing an independent agenda in post-war foreign policy, New Zealand and Australia had much in common. The war, Phillips concludes, did not create a new kind of nationalism in New Zealand.
Hank Nelson's account of Australia's occupation and administration of German New Guinea is inherently interesting and extends our knowledge of an aspect of the war which is normally consigned to a sentence or two in histories of the conflict. But it makes very little effort to engage with either of the themes of the conference.
Avner Offer's contribution is intellectually the most original (though again marginal to the themes of the book). He develops powerfully and elegantly the argument that we can only understand the decision on the part of European nations, particularly Germany, to go to war in 1914 by considering the code of 'honour' manifested quintessentially in the duel. Honour, too, was an element in the decision by many individuals to volunteer to fight in the war. Offer's argument provides a useful foil to the Fischer school which attributes to Germany a much more coherent set of foreign policy objectives, including the domination of mittel Europa.
Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior have no doubt that Germany aspired to the mastery of Europe and, for that reason alone, that Britain's involvement in the war was necessary. Britain could not have contained Germany, or defended liberal values and representative government, had it not played a central role in the fighting. Wilson and Prior agree that war could have been conducted more competently by the British command, but argue that even had the British generals achieved a more effective correlation between the aims of their campaigns and the resources available the war would still have exacted an appalling toll. A conflict between industrial giants of almost equal resources was bound to be bloody and protracted.
Geoffrey Blainey's contribution to the debate is a typical one, full of intriguing speculation about the might-have-beens of history. Particularly striking is his discussion of what might have happened had Australia refused to enter the war and to occupy German New Guinea. This German colony might then have been occupied by Britain's ally, Japan, and in the postwar settlement Japan rather than Australia might have gained the League of Nations mandate for the territory. What would have been the strategic implications of this in 1941?
The last major essay is by Barry Smith who is, as always, provoking in the best sense. Accepting that Australia had no choice in the context of 1914 but to be involved in the war, Smith focuses on the costs of the conflict. His emphasis is on the often overlooked victims: the wounded, and the women and families who endured the pain of the war for decades thereafter. As Smith says graphically, the war created a generation of bereft and lonely women. In addition to its demographic impact (for example, on the gender balance), it had significant implications for the composition of political parties in the inter-war years and contributed to the 'feminisation' of religion. Smith concludes with a challenge to the more pessimistic assessments of soldier settlement schemes.
Almost all of the essays contained in this volume are a useful contribution to the history of the First World War. It is a pity, however, that, despite Wilcox's thoughtful editorial conclusion, they do not, in the sum, form a more coherent and integrated analysis of the issues the volume aims to address.
This is the paperback edition of Buruma's work published in 1994, a sign that it has already made some impact. The book should have an impact: it addresses the central problem of why some nations (Germany and Japan, specifically) committed atrocities on an extraordinarily large scale during the Second World War and how these nations have subsequently handled the guilt associated with these horrific episodes. The book contains both some encouragingly good news and some which is disquietingly bad.
If one has been brought up in a Western Christian culture, one is not surprised to learn that individual human beings, and sometimes governments, are capable of perpetrating heinous crimes. It is called sin. Mostly the perpetrators are brought to book, acknowledge -- however reluctantly -- that they have been guilty and, in some cases, repent and make amends to society. Even non-Christian citizens subscribe to the ethics of the Ten Commandments and of the Sermon on the Mount because they concede that society functions better when the norms of decency and humanity are observed. The good citizen hates crime and corruption. It is simply an ineradicable part of our political culture to be appalled by these things when they occur.
We in the spiritual/intellectual West have a deeply ingrained sense of justice and fair play. When we learned of Japanese and German atrocities, such as the Nanking massacre and the Nazi death camps, we wondered whether we were fighting against either sub-human species or nations that were somehow pathologically incapable of recognising what was humane and what was not. Certainly, we saw our entry into the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as being motivated by a determination to stop unwarranted aggression on the part of powers which had either intentionally repudiated membership in the West (Germany) or who remained encapsulated in a barbaric medieval militaristic culture, impervious to the values of a more modern and humane civilisation (Japan).
So, the Germans knew better but eagerly embraced a criminal political culture characterised by its ideology of the master race and its contempt for pluralistic parliamentary democracy, and justified their foreign policy of war and genocide on the basis of this ideology. The Japanese, likewise, justified their aggression on racial grounds and on the alleged historical mission to impose their rule on the 'lesser breeds' of South-east Asia, of course at the expense of the European colonial powers. The West, allied to the Soviet Union, amassed huge forces of men and materials to rid the world of the twin scourges of Nazism and Japanese imperialism. In doing so, weapons of unprecedented destructive power were employed. In Germany, conventional bombing wreaked more actual death and destruction than did the atomic bombs visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Axis Powers' will to fight was thus broken, and Western democratic constitutions were introduced under the watchful eye of Allied occupation forces. East Germany was, of course, absorbed into the Soviet Empire. Thereby, the West had hoped to have eradicated the ideologies which had given rise to the conflicts in the first place.
The concern whether this hope has been realised was Ian Buruma's motivation for this book. Have both the Germans and the Japanese learned what they did wrong and why the West reacted as severely as it did? Have they shown sufficient or even any remorse for the horrors they perpetrated now that they presumably know better? Buruma's research revealed that in Germany there has been to a large extent a cultural shift towards Western values and that this is evidenced in the work of many liberal-minded historians and other social scientists. But having noted that, he has observed both blatant and subtle illustrations of the appeal of the old anti-Semitism and anti-democratic values. In other words, there are still many in Germany who have not yet appropriated the ethics of Christian civilisation. Witness the anti-foreigner outrages that have occurred especially since German reunification. The encouraging news is that officially such behaviour is condemned as criminal and anti-constitutional. There is a worry, though, that some public servants will not rigorously prosecute offenders. A subtle undercurrent of racism still exists in Germany, as Buruma has confirmed.
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