World War II and the fog of history

ANNIVERSARIES always bring forth memories, some of them dark and conflicting, and this 60th year since the end of World War II demonstrates that there is no agreed-upon narrative of the 20th century's epic conflagration. We have seen China's violent demonstrations against Japan's teaching of its war history. Even though Japan has apologized many times for its war crimes, it cannot resist whitewashing its World War II past. Japan's historical view of those tortured times may never fit with China's.

Southeast Asians suffered horribly under the Japanese occupation, but many willingly joined the Japanese because they opposed their British, French, and Dutch colonial masters more. Indians are still unsure of whom to commemorate -- the heroic soldiers of the British Indian Army who fought and died opposing a Japanese invasion or the Indian National Army, made up mostly of Indian soldiers recruited in Japanese prison camps, who fought alongside the Japanese against their own countrymen because they believed the British were the real enemy.

The French in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia entered into an uneasy alliance with the Japanese after the fall of France at the direction of the collaborationist Vichy government. And Thailand decided it was better not to resist the Japanese at all. A clever Thai ambassador in Washington refused to deliver a Japanese-directed declaration of war, thereby allowing the Americans at war's end to treat the Thais as victims rather than as one of the Axis powers.

Contradictory narratives run all through Europe as well. President Bush skillfully navigated the tricky shoals of Russia's commemoration of the ''Great Patriotic War" against Hitler, and the sensibilities of the Baltic States for whom 1945 merely substituted Russian tyranny for that of the Nazis.

The European Commission said that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, rather than the fall of the Nazis, marked the true ''end of dictatorship" in Europe, and the Financial Times editorialized: ''Russia also needs to acknowledge the Soviet Union's role in collaborating with Hitler in occupying Eastern Europe in 1939-1940 and in imposing its rule on the region in 1945."

Russians find this astonishing. To most Russians, defeating Hitler was the greatest -- ''perhaps the only," quipped The Economist -- unquestionably good thing the Soviet Union did. Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union ''The Evil Empire," but Vladimir Putin says today that its demise was the single greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

Americans tend to think that Private Ryan and the Band of Brothers won the war against Hitler. Britons remember when they stood up to Hitler all alone. But with 27 million dead, more than all the Allies combined, most Russians would agree with Stalin's assessment that the British bought the time, the Americans put up the money, but the Russians paid the blood.

Of all the Axis powers, Germany has done the most to own up to its Nazi past. ''We have the responsibility to keep alive the memory of all this suffering and its causes," said Germany's President Horst Koehler. Yet Germans are pointing out that they, too, were victims. Discussion of the mass deportations of Germans from other countries in the aftermath of the war, and the atrocities by Russians troops -- as many as 2 million German women were raped by Russian soldiers -- is only recently surfacing.

Americans scarcely remember now that Finland was once considered as an Axis ally during its winter war against the Soviets, and that in April of 1945 many of the army units defending Hitler's Berlin were French, Baltic, and Scandinavian divisions fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft claims that ''more Frenchmen collaborated than resisted" and that more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis side than with the Allies.

The fire bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo might easily have been considered war crimes if the Allies had lost, and there are many today who doubt the morality of dropping an atomic bomb. My guess is, however, as the recent public television documentary ''Victory in the Pacific" tends to corroborate, that even more Japanese lives were saved than American by the bomb, because the Japanese were prepared to resist an invasion to the last man, woman, and child.

But there is no agreement on that now, and perhaps there will never be.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.