There was no “phony war” at sea. The Battle of the Atlantic started on the first day of the Second World War, 3 Sept 1939, with the sinking of SS Athenia by a German U-boat. It continued until the last day of the war and so was the longest campaign of the Second World War and the most destructive naval conflict in history.
Dimbleby’s account of this campaign is an elegantly written horror story, alternating between accounts of the ghastly fighting at sea, and the operational and strategic planning of the Allies and the Axis that guided the slaughter.

Churchill famously said that the U-boat menace was the one thing that gave him sleepless nights during the war. However it would be fair to say he brought many of the nightmares that afflicted him on himself. Most damningly Churchill prioritised the militarily pointless and morally indefensible bombing of German cities by the psychopathic head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, over the vital defence of the convoys across the North Atlantic. Hence Coastal Command was denied the relatively few aircraft that could have turned the tide of the battle months earlier.

Dimbleby asserts that Churchill was possessed of a great strategic vision. But this seems rather at odds with the account presented which suggests a certain strategic fickleness on Churchill’s part. It is true he did have a vast and complex set of problems on his mind. But one does get the impression of a man easily given to temporary military enthusiasms to little useful purpose but to the detriment of some truly vital endeavours. Dimbleby puts this into sharpest focus on some of Churchill’s choices around the Battle of the Atlantic. But one sees this in many other places such as his failure to finish the defeat of the Italians in North Africa before, wholly ineffectually, attempting to arrest the invasion of Greece.

Rather than military strategy Churchill’s genius was of the political variety. His forging of the trans-Atlantic alliance with Roosevelt was perhaps his finest hour. This resulted ultimately in the Allied victory, not least by bringing the true strategic genius of the US General George Marshall to bear on the situation. This inexorably refashioned Allied strategy away from Churchill’s fanciful Mediterranean focus – which arose more from his desire to keep some semblance of unity on the British Empire rather than to pose a lethal threat to the Axis – and towards an altogether more effective intent to mount an invasion of France to swiftly strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.

In spite of these strategic failings a combination of increasing effectiveness of convoy tactics, and improved technology ultimately, and with dramatic suddenness in May 1943, turned the tide of the Battle in the Allies’ favour. Thereafter, with victory in the North Atlantic, victory in the overall war was assured. Convincingly Dimbleby argues that the code-breaking of Bletchley Park was only marginally a factor in this victory, not least because the Germans had also cracked the Royal Navy code and the advantages that Bletchley provided were somewhat cancelled out in the war at sea.

The Battle of the Atlantic was to any imagining horrendous and Dimbleby conveys this well – from the account of Italian prisoners weeping in terror as they drowned imprisoned in the holds of the torpedoed Laconia, to the massacre of the Arctic Convoy PQ 17, condemned to its doom by incompetence in the Admiralty for which, of course, no one was ever held to account: That the lives and heroism of merchant seamen were held cheap by the Establishment is a recurring theme in this book.

The Battle of the Atlantic is a gripping and generous-spirited book, drawing on the accounts of German as well as Allied participants recognising the courage and humanity of all the participants in the Battle, while also recognising the horrendous things that many of these ordinary human beings did to each other.

 Patrick Leigh Fermor, legendary travel writer and Special Operations Executive officer, never published during his own lifetime this, his full account of the kidnap of General Kreipe in Crete in 1944. His junior SOE colleague Billy Moss did, with Leigh Fermor’s help. Ill Met by Moonlight was published in 1950 and made into a famous movie with Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor.

However as Roderick Bailey points out in his foreword to this book, Billy Moss did not speak Greek and the Kriepe kidnapping was his first clandestine operation. So his account lacked understanding and appreciation of the Greek partisans with whom he fought.

Leigh Fermor’s account is therefore something of an apologia to pay proper tribute to the people upon whom he depended for his life during his years undercover in Crete. He notes towards the end of his account that, “There has been more than a hint in these pages of [the kindness and generosity of the Cretan people] and of that aspect of Cretan life which suddenly gives the phrase ‘Brotherhood in arms’ such meaning”.

It is this, rather than a desire to convey a “boy’s-own” adventure, which seems at the heart of this account. It is an account that is marked by a remarkable joie de vivre in spite of the harsh circumstances he describes, and the constant threat of death under which he lived. As such it contrasts interestingly with Eric Newby’s similarly themed, but altogether more melancholic, account of his time being sheltered by an impoverished Italian rural population while on the run from the Germans: Love and War in the Appenines.

Leigh-Fermor conceived of the kidnapping of the German commander in Crete as a bloodless operation, to prevent German reprisals against Cretan civilians. Originally he aimed to kidnap the brutal General Muller, but this plan was thwarted with Muller’s transfer and replacement with General Kreipe.

Leigh-Fermor went ahead with the plan anyway as a morale boosting exercise for the Cretan resistance, and to keep them distracted from shedding German blood and hence provoking fierce reprisals.

He almost achieved his bloodless coup, though his Cretan comrades were at one point compelled to leave the poor driver who had been captured with the General in an unmarked grave. And some months after the operation the Germans conducted a series of brutal reprisals anyway, which may, or may not have been linked to the kidnapping.

Given this, and the undertaking of the operation late in the war when Germany’s fate was all but decided the strategic value of the operation is open to question. But the courage and fortitude that it entailed is not, as Leigh Fermor’s account amply demonstrates. Abducting a General gives a fine insight into a little-known corner of the Second World War, prosecuted, in the main, by ordinary people at terrible cost.

Famously the Indian sub-continent freed itself from British rule through a non-violent struggle led by Gandhi. However rather than this being a great triumph for passive resistance, the efforts by Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh leadership to carve up the spoils more than made up for it in terms of bloodshed: the Partition of India saw one of the most horrendous blood baths of the 20th Century, and the largest forced migration in human history. Sometimes these two things coincided with trains of refugees pulling into their destination stations dripping with the blood of the women, children and men passengers who had been hacked to death in ambushes.

In Midnight’s Furies, Nishid Hajari details how the political calculations, petty jealousies, posturings, misjudgements and misunderstandings of the sub-continent’s political leaderships, in particular Jinnah and Nehru, led to the sectarian carnage that engulfed the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan.

Nehru

Hajari provides a much less sympathetic portrait of Nehru than Alex Von Tunzelman’s fine account of the same period, Indian Summer. For Hajari, Nehru failed in his responsibility as a statesman of obtaining some sort of rapprochement with Jinnah and the Muslim League, and hence undermined his vision of a secular India for all Indians. Hajari also portrays Nehru, at least in the early days of his premiership, as a man in office but not in control. His dream of a secular India uniting Hindu, Muslim and Sikh under a common citizenship bloodily undermined by the extraordinary violence of the period, which his administration seemed powerless to prevent.

Doubtless some of this was spontaneous communal violence drawing on obscure but profound local animosities and feuds. But much of it was not. Each community produced paramilitary forces, many of them highly professional as a result of the large numbers of former soldiers in their midst. These set to the butchery of their neighbours with a relish and ruthlessness that would not have been out of place in the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe a few years earlier.

This killing was frequently facilitated by the failures of Indian and Pakistani police and military to properly intervene to uphold the law. Sometimes the police and army stood idly by. Sometimes they became active participants in the slaughter.

In this regard they were echoing the equivocal leaderships of the two states: Jinnah appears to have missed the logical contradiction of wanting a secular republic for Muslims only. In India Hindus and Sikhs seemed to take their lead less from Nehru and more from Sadar Patel, the States minister in the Indian Union government. Patel regarded the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population as a good thing, purging the state of potential fifth columnists. He also regarded the neo-fascist RSSS with considerable warmth despite their butchery of tens of thousands ordinary Indians.

Patel

With such equivocal leadership at the heart of government it is unsurprising that so many police and troops turned a blind eye to the atrocities. To his credit, when able to do little else, Nehru time and again sought out and faced down Hindu murder squads, striving to personally halt the killing which so much of his own administration was acquiescing in. Order only finally began to be restored by the intervention of Nepalese Gurkha and Southern Indian troops, who were less given to the sectarian passions of the northerners. The assassination of Gandhi by a right wing Hindu also caused some pause to the likes of Patel and the rest of the nation who perhaps only then began to glimpse the lunacy that their sectarianism was bringing.

Hajari is particularly interested in the origins of Pakistan’s current disfunction and sponsorship of terrorism, something which he shows very well. However the book also casts significant light on the current disfunctionalities of the Indian state.

Shortly before the victory for Prime Minister Modi’s BJP in the Indian general election I spoke to an Indian friend about the anticipated result. He argued that there were three strands in the Indian independence movement: the Nehruist/Ambedkarist republican tradition which has been dominant for much of Indian history; a communist/socialist strand which has enjoyed power in some of the Indian states; and finally the Hindu Nationalist tradition which Modi was now bringing to power.

However from Hajari’s account this Hindu Nationalist tradition was a very dominant one in the first Indian government, constantly undermining the visions of Nehru and Ambedkar. The caste-based apartheid, the rapes and murders of girls and young women, the enslavement of vulnerable workers that disfigure contemporary India, the world’s largest democracy, may, at least in part, be seen to derive directly from the Hindu-nationalist vision that so bloodily asserted itself in 1947 and asserts itself still to the present day.

Gandhi and Jinnah in happier days

Midnight’s Furies is a beautifully written but harrowing account of the origins of India and Pakistan. It is an important book about the origins of a contemporary Cold War, about human beings’ inhumanity to other human beings, about how magnaminty and empathy are so vital to diplomacy, and how their absence can lead to carnage.