Eighty Years Ago This Week

  General George Patton now military governor of Bavaria pursued his gift for public controversy with  an interview in which he said that denazification was wildly overblown and that the political debate over Nazism was equivalent to the that between Democrats and Republicans in the US. He privately admired Germany and saw the nation as the only worthwhile bastion against Soviet domination of Europe. He had also developed a broad dislike of Jews on the basis of what he saw of concentration camp survivors. He was dismissed from his post by Eisenhower. The Potsdam conference had mandated a Council of Foreign Ministers as a regular forum to settle post war issues. In reality it became an arena for Soviet attempts to dominate the process and its first formal meeting provided ample proof. The dispute focused on major questions of procedure. In particular the  Soviets objected to the inclusion of French and Chinese representatives. The meeting broke up with no significant ...

  Maynard Keynes had been sent to Washington to negotiate the future of economic relations between the US and the UK following  the President's abrupt termination of Lend-Lease aid. In military terms Britain had been able to hold on its status as one of the "Big Three" while the war lasted, but now had to face life in peace with an economy geared almost entirely to war production and its finances in ruins. Keynes's opening case was leaked to the press and showed how little negotiating power he held; his case rested on notions of equity only. In proportionate terms Britain had made a vastly greater sacrifice to defeat the Axis than the US; the impact on its economy was "considerable" whilst the US incurred a  "negligible". Perhaps worse, Britain could only claim to have passed very modest assistance through to other allies. During the First World War Britain had passed much US financial aid through to allies notably Russia but was left with no enfor...

    It is uncommon to hear discordant opinions about the RAF's achievement commemorated on Battle of Britain Day but possibly the most strident came from one of the service's highest profile leaders: Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C of Bomber Command. His words aimed to put the praise usually given to Fighter Command for victory in the Battle of Britain in a broader context. However they read as astonishingly mean spirited.  They give valuable sidelights on the internal dynamics and mindset of the RAF. He claimed that "[i]t was definitely Bomber Command's wholesale destruction of the invasion barges in the Channel Ports that convinced the Germans of the futility of attempting to cross the Channel", thus claiming final credit for his own arm of the service. He gave no evidence for this view and there was none to give. Perhaps one tenth of the barges were destroyed by bombing. He also plays down the sacrifice of Fighter Command pilots by de...

  William Joyce (" Lord Haw Haw")  the Fascist leader,  who had fled to Germany on the outbreak of war and broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain, was sentenced to death for treason after a trial which lasted a couple of days; the jury deliberated for only twenty three minutes. He pled not guilty and there was no argument about the facts; the case turned entirely on a legal point. Joyce had been born in the USA to an Irish father who was a naturalized American. Joyce was never legally a British citizen although he had lived in the country since childhood. He had obtained  a British passport   by making a false declaration and this - together with a false claim to being British when he was joining his university OTC - was held to show that he "owed allegiance to the King" and could thus commit treason. Prime minister Attlee and Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India who had returned there after discussions with the government in London, each made broadcasts about the fu...

  The reappearance of this photograph on Twitter, questionably captioned as showing Stalin on learning of Barbarossa, provides nonetheless a reminder that Stalin was blind sided by the German attack despite almost unanimous and extensive evidence that it was coming.  Stalin was terrified that Hitler would attack and had striven to avoid anything that might have provoked him; he was a committed appeaser. Hitler was too good an actor. Both Stalin and Neville Chamberlain saw him as a dangerously volatile and touchy leader. They did not spot that his outbursts were calculated pieces of theatre. Sir Horace Wilson,  Chamberlain's right hand man, was obsessively risk-averse and fed the prime minister's fear that Hitler would go to war if pushed; they shared the delusion that Hitler shared a normal human being's dislike of war. In reality Hitler revelled in the prospect of war.

    Japan's wartime leader General Tojo attempted to kill himself when US troops came to arrest him for his war crimes. He had no time to perform seppuku as would have been traditional and shot himself in the chest, but missed the heart. He survived and did not cheat the hangman. The Academie Francaise took steps against four members who had been convicted of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers but there was a curious imbalance in how they were treated. The two most prominent, Marshal Petain and Charles Maurras, were struck off but their seats would remain vacant whilst they were still alive; they remained half immortal. Abel Hermant and Abel Bonnard were fully expelled and new occupants sought for their seats. For the first time since the early days of the war the Brigade of Guards mounted the "Bank Picket" when a detachment of troops marched from Wellington Barracks to the Bank of England to protect it from a repetition of the attack during the Gordon Riots. In a conc...