The Good War that Wasn’t

Book Review by Terry Taylor

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of WWII, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker, 565 pp. Simon and Shuster, $30.


“The Good War” it wasn’t. At least according to what has been uncovered by the novelist and armchair historian, Nicholson Baker. For this book, Baker went back to original sources: newspaper and magazine articles and diary entries from the days leading up to and spanning the first months of the second great war of the 20th Century. As you turn the pages, you will recognize the names of many of the hundreds of people whose stories are retold here.
Baker chronicles the slow murderous slide into a war that devoured tens of millions of human souls, and marked the beginning of the large scale bombing of cities for the sole purpose of terrorizing civilians.

What we learn from the one- or two-paragraph vignettes he shares with us is that much of what we have been taught, and what many of us still believe about WWII simply isn’t true. There aren’t good guys and bad guys. There is only murder conducted at a scale that would sicken even the most hardened soldier.

There are signs of failed hope. We learn that there were German generals who had begun plotting to remove Hitler even before he invaded Czechoslovakia . He tells us that there were diplomats and peacemakers who tried to prevent the war, and tried to stop it once the tanks had begun to roll.

We see Quakers and members of other peace groups trying to get relief supplies to women and children in occupied France , but being prevented by the U.S. and England .
We witness the anonymous heroism of people like the head of FOR in Germany who refused to fight and were executed.

Baker doesn’t shy away from the guilt that falls on the heads of allies. Hitler’s minions were evil, but in this book we discover something many of us had suspected: both Churchill and Roosevelt were anti-Semites who turned their backs on the Jews who were attempting to flee the onrush of the Holocaust machine.

And then there is the bombing, the indiscriminate incineration of non-combatants undertaken to push them to the point of suing their governments for peace. This bombing was conducted by all parties to this conflagration. One of the most breathtaking insights for me was learning that military strategists on both the Allied and Axis sides warned their leaders that strategic bombing was not only ineffective and a waste of munitions, it was in fact counter-productive, steeling the will of those who climbed out of the rubble after being bombed.

The title of the book, Human Smoke, is the way that one German military official referred to the ashes drifting down from the crematoria smokestacks at one of the death camps. But, I think that Baker chose these words for the title because ultimately they reflect our true legacy from WWII: a thirst for the ashes of civilians and an eerie ability to close our eyes to the price we pay for securing our political goals, no matter how lofty they seem.