A. J. Liebling goes to war
A. J. Liebling is best known for writing about the doings of New York's demimonde, the vaudevillians, burlesquers, small-time operators, sports impresarios, athletes, bookies, and sharps, its curious customers in all their hues. He is especially renowned for writing on boxers and on the pleasures of the table. But when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, he became The New Yorker's correspondent in Paris, taking the place of Janet Flanner. ("Paris has been having a fit of prosperity, gaiety, and hospitality," her last dispatch, sent July 1939, began. "It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilized good time." Liebling, who had spent a year in Paris in his youth as student and gourmand, seemed a good bet to replace Flanner in the changed circumstances, though the magazine's editor, Harold Ross, did implore him to, "for God's sake, keep away from the low life."
The fruits of this mission and those elsewhere after the German occupation of France may be found in the Library of America's "A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings" ($40). As it happened, Liebling's taste for fighting extended to the military version and he saw a good deal of action after leaving France to the Germans. He ended up on or close to the front lines in Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. He flew on a bombing mission over France and he was in London for the first German doodlebug attacks. Most momentous of all, he was present on D-Day for the invasion of Normandy ("Our [craft] made a turn and headed for the opening like a halfback going into a hole in the line." Liebling's eye for idiosyncratic detail and wry observation (Britain is "the only nation in the world that habitually boasts of its own modesty) is much in evidence in his accounts, as is his talent for deadpan commentary ("The science of booby-trapping has taken a good deal of the fun out of following hot on the enemy's heels").
The volume is made up of three previously published books and a large selection of uncollected pieces. And, frankly, there is much that is either dross or repetition. I wish the Library of America had made this a wide-ranging Liebling volume, halving the war material and devoting the remaining 500-plus pages to his writing on the pugilists, artistes, rum characters, and chafing dishes that were his delight. In fact, his best writing on the war is already represented in both volumes of the Library of America's "Reporting World War II: American Journalism." Why serve up a jumbo extra helping? Liebling himself provides the answer: Looking back from the vantage point of the early 1960s, he acknowledges that he sometimes feels "a deplorable nostalgia" for the war. "The times were full of certainties: We could be certain we were right - and we were - and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too."
But was World War II really a "good war?" Nicholson Baker hoped to answer that question and whether "waging it help[ed] anyone who needed help" when he set out to write "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" (Simon and Schuster, $30). The answer to both questions from his point of view is clearly no, which has, not surprisingly, infuriated most reviewers. The book is an assemblage of passages taken from newspapers, diaries, memoirs, memos, and statements, all publicly available in English. This is not a secret history, in other words, and in fact not a history at all. It is a chronologically arranged selection of passages that gives a dark view of a very dark time. It pays due attention to the crimes of the Nazis and of Japan's militarists, but is also unsparing of the Allied leaders. The book punctures the popular version of the war, adding details that have been lost to general knowledge, underplayed, or excused as being necessary to the successful conduct of the war.
The most striking example of lost knowledge is the staggering fact that after the World War I Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, the victorious Allied powers continued to blockade Germany for months, starving its people in order, as Winston Churchill put it, "to secure the just terms for which we have fought." Those terms were finally acquiesced to in June 1919, in the Treaty of Versailles - a retributive instrument that no historian doubts contributed to the rise of Nazism and the horrors that ensued. Also lost from sight is that in 1934, French, English, and American companies sold tanks and aircraft to Germany.
Unfortunate events that are commonly excused as necessary to winning the war are chiefly the targeting of civilians, which the English (and later the Americans) did with sickening, retaliatory gusto. The book ends in December 1941 and the US entry into the war - when, as Baker observes, most of the people who would die in the war were still alive. He seems to believe that the war could have been avoided or ended by negotiating with an undefeated Germany; that despite German invasions, depredations, and programs of extermination, to fight was wrong and, indeed, it goaded Hitler into the "final solution." I can't buy that. Despite the book's intentions, which are pacifist and with which I am in general sympathy, by its evidence alone, Hitler was intent on creating a new world - hell on earth, from a humanitarian point of view. But what Baker does show clearly is that there is more than one kind of hell and the Allies created their own, a quite unnecessary and inexcusable one.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached at Pow3@verizon.net. 