February 13, 2025
Archive

Maine novelist disputes justness of WWII

SOUTH BERWICK – Even the staunchest opponents of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are loathe to take issue with World War II, the quintessential conflict between good and evil that became the model of a morally just war that saved civilization.

So it’s no surprise that novelist Nicholson Baker’s latest venture into nonfiction, “Human Smoke,” has stirred up strong feelings. After all, he questions the popular notion of the just war and indicates that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt share blame with Adolf Hitler in setting the stage for the deadliest and most destructive war in history.

Baker makes his case through hundreds of brief vignettes culled from newspapers, diaries and secondary sources that are presented chronologically and without context or commentary by the author. The book ends on Dec. 31, 1941, as the world plunges into the abyss.

The only point at which Baker injects his own views is the close of a two-page “afterword” in which he dedicates the book to its heroes – pacifists who risked public scorn and imprisonment by fighting to stave off the war.

Outraged by the invasion of Iraq, Baker said he was familiar with arguments that some wars had to have been fought and that World War II is the premier example.

“If this is the war that everyone holds up as the benchmark of a morally justified war, let’s look very closely at how it began, let’s find out what happened, in what order, and where the moments were that things could have turned out differently. Let’s ask the question, ‘Was it a good war?'” he said in an interview at his 18th-century farmhouse in this New Hampshire border town where he and his family have lived for the past decade.

Exploring the origins of World War II may seem something of a reach for an unconventional author known for quirky novels like “Vox,” which details a phone sex conversation and became a footnote to history after it was learned that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to President Bill Clinton. Another novel, “The Mezzanine,” explores the thoughts of an office worker who rides an escalator during his lunch hour.

He has written articles in The New Yorker ranging from the history of the fingernail clipper to the workings of a movie projector, but his best-known shift to nonfiction was the 2001 “Double Fold,” which lamented the destruction of newspaper archives and their replacement by microfilm.

It was while tending the British Library newspaper collection that he rescued from the shredder that Baker began reading about “the horrible period” that led to World War II and prompted him to dig deeper and try “to make some sense” of the situation.

Baker said he was surprised and shocked at the way Churchill responded to Hitler’s attacks on Poland and other neighboring states by launching a relentless bombing campaign against German cities as well as a blockade that was designed to starve the enemy into submission.

“He was acting like a bloodthirsty maniac during that period. That has to go back on the record in all of its unpleasantness. We can’t learn from a hero like that. It’s a mistake to say that because Hitler was bad, we have to clean up the image of Churchill. Churchill was also bad. There’s no equivalence. Moral equivalence is a complete mistake,” Baker said.

Baker maintains that Churchill’s bellicose actions and Roosevelt’s eagerness to supply Britain with ships and planes served only to prop up Hitler’s standing with the German people and strengthen his hold on the country.

“It was the war – the long, slow war of bombing and blockade that fundamentally helped to keep Hitler in power,” he said. “The fact that the country was attacked night after night in this way released a massive antipathy to the British.”

The people in the book whom Baker looks up to include Mohandas Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence; Herbert Hoover, who opposed the British blockade; and a handful of lesser-known pacifists who spoke out against the run up to war.

Tall and lean, with a full but neatly trimmed white beard, the 51-year-old Baker does not regard himself as “a war-minded person,” but neither does he claim to be “an absolute pacifist.” He is sympathetic to the Quaker tradition of nonviolence, having had Quaker forebears and having gone to Haverford College, which was founded by Quakers.

“Human Smoke,” which draws its title from a description of the ashes at Auschwitz, is not meant to be a comprehensive history. Rather, he said, “it’s just one journey through the thicket of events,” one that captures the anguish of the period and puts human faces on those caught up in it.

The book slices and dices the years that led to total war into hundreds of little anecdotes rather than a single sweeping narrative. Baker said he chose stories that revealed some aspect of the war, were unforgettable and had an element of “human truth.” He presents the facts in a detached, journalistic manner that belies his underlying passion and leaves it to the reader to sort out contradictions and infer the broader picture.

“A war is the sum of innumerable tiny stories. It’s not one big story that you can sit down and tell people in half an hour,” he said.

The reviews, Baker noted, have ranged from “extremely positive” to “ferociously negative.” In The New York Times, William Grimes vilified “Human Smoke” as a “self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book.” But Colm Toibin, in the newspaper’s Sunday Book Review, called it “riveting and fascinating” and “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism.”

While the book does not speculate about how the Allies could have responded to the horrors of the Third Reich short of waging total war, Baker maintains that any other scenario would have been preferable to what unfolded in the 31/2 years that follow the book’s final entry.

One of Baker’s more interesting “what-ifs” is rooted in peace feelers put out by Hitler in the summer of 1940 after the fall of France and the conquests of Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries.

Had there been an armistice, Baker said, there would have been at least a chance that the borders of occupied Europe would have reopened, less extreme elements would have displaced Hitler and the Holocaust would have been averted. Instead, tens of millions died, with most of the deaths after the events described in the book.

“If you stop the killings, other possibilities emerge,” Baker said. “I can imagine a Europe in a state of truce in the period of this book in which London was intact, the Jews were alive, the German cities were standing, Tokyo wasn’t firebombed and Pearl Harbor was unattacked. I can imagine that being a state of affairs that could have persisted, and that Hitler’s government could have metamorphosed into something more moderate.”

Instead, he said, the killing continued. “It couldn’t have turned out much worse than it did,” he said.


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like