Fighting on all Fronts (3 page)

While the Second World War began as an inter-imperialist struggle, it is clear that as it progressed popular movements also developed with their
own goals. Both elements were involved in combat, but shared little beyond having a common foe (although even here there were exceptions such as the INA). An important question is therefore how the two currents interacted.

Once again certain rhythms can be detected. In Europe there was cooperation between Allied imperialism and resistance at the outset in the joint enterprise of defeating the Axis. The sheer weight of the Axis offensive left the Allied imperialists no choice but to call on all possible forces to oppose it and if resistance movements could challenge the Axis behind the lines this was welcome. The Allies were keenest to support the “respectable” resistance movements tied politically to governments-in-exile (often based in London) but since these tended to attentism, others might be considered.

The first European resistance movement to be recognised by the Allies was the Chetniks of Yugoslavia. At that point France had been defeated, the Soviet Union and the US were still to enter combat. The British state stood alone and unable to fight on the Continent. Churchill therefore decided to back forces which could “set Europe ablaze” and to establish the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to liaise with them. At this stage Western Allied governments were prepared to work with a wide variety of movements including those dominated by communists, such as in Italy, France and Greece. However, politics remained paramount since the point, in government eyes, was to assist the inter-imperialist struggle and nothing more.

Since many of the resistance movements were led by communists one might have expected major assistance from Moscow. Russia was so involved battling for its survival until the turn of fortunes in Stalingrad (February 1943) that military aid was unlikely but political support could have been made available. It was not. Stalin’s attitude was demonstrated graphically when the Communist International was dissolved in the same year. For him Russia’s need to work closely with other Allied governments to defeat Hitler took precedence. In its dissolution statement the Communist International declared:

the sacred duty of the broadest masses of the people, and first and foremost of progressive workers, is to support in every way the war efforts of the governments of [Allied] countries for the sake of the speediest destruction of the Hitlerite bloc…irrespective of party or religion.
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As the war progressed there was a cooling of relations between Allied governments and resistance movements. By the end Allied governments
frequently acted with outright hostility as the ultimate purpose of the war came into focus for each side.

The case of Poland showed the role of Allied political calculations clearly. Although Hitler’s invasion was the official reason for Britain entering the war, while the struggle was in the balance London’s attitude was generally influenced by Moscow which, following the Hitler-Stalin pact, regarded the country as its to conquer. So Western aid to the resistance was limited. Although by late 1944 the Polish resistance had killed eight times more German troops than the Greek resistance and at least 15 times more than the French, it received respectively just 10 percent and 5.6 percent of the supplies committed to these countries.
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In the Far East resistance movements were unlikely to receive support from Allied powers either because those powers were themselves already defeated (such as France or the Netherlands) or because a strong resistance movement would be able to throw off the shackles of colonialism once the war ended. Only the US, which had yet to establish formal political influence in the area, dabbled with the resistance movements in places like China and Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was even temporarily counted as a US agent! But Washington concluded before long that its interests lay in bolstering the former colonial masters rather than forces opposed to foreign control in general.

In Greece, Britain initially backed both EAM-ELAS and the attentist EDES movement, a famous example of this being the destruction of the strategically important Gorgopotamus viaduct by a combination of British secret agents and fighters from both Greek groups. However, this ran against the political grain, which was to favour the more right wing tendencies. In France de Gaulle’s Secret Army received favourable treatment over other more radical groups. In Yugoslavia, in the words of one British official, Mihailovich’s Chetniks should be favoured by London over communist-led partisans: “independently of whether or not he continues to refuse to take a more active part in resisting and attacking Axis forces”.
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It required incontrovertible proof of Chetnik collaboration with the enemy to shift support to Tito’s partisans.

The official war aims of the Allies were supposed to be expressed in the Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 upholding “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”.
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But this was a sham designed to draw in the masses. The real stance of these
governments was developed at the various meetings of the Big Three (Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill). One famous encounter between Churchill and Stalin in the Kremlin in October 1944 took decisions which Churchill himself described as “crude, and even callous”. Churchill’s account of the notorious “percentages agreement” goes as follows:

The moment was apt for business, so I said…how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in Roumania, for us to have ninety percent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yougoslavia?… It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down…
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In Europe therefore the usefulness of resistance movements to Allied governments decreased in direct relation to the declining power of Axis forces and the increasing possibility of imposing an imperialist peace. There was a tipping point, discernible almost everywhere, when the imperialists concluded that the benefits of popular national movements confronting the Axis were outweighed by the disadvantages of potential democratic interference in their plans. The transition from one phase to another was brilliantly expressed by a British brigadier writing about Greece. He argued for public disapproval of EAM-ELAS as follows:

we can expect them to be anti-British. Military considerations, however, demand that we should give maximum support…thus bolstering up EAM. Although these two policies appear to be diametrically opposed, this is not the case, as it is solely a question of timing. Our immediate policy should be the purely military one of giving support to the guerrilla organisations to enable them to assist us in liberating their country… This should give way to the political policy of no support to EAM as soon as liberation is achieved.
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This policy was followed meticulously. Germany was allowed to withdraw without interference from the Greek islands to the mainland so that the resistance could not gain control before the British were ready. When the Germans left Greece (a little too early for London’s liking) Britain rushed troops to Athens to destroy EAM-ELAS. They arrived on 14 October 1944 with the following orders from Churchill: “Do not hesitate to fire… Act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion was in progress”.
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Wholesale Royal Air Force (RAF) bombing of working class residential districts in Athens followed. By the end of December 50,000 Greeks had been killed. Thereafter Nazi-trained Greek battalions were mobilised to pursue a civil war which ultimately cost 158,000 lives.

In Poland, Stalin achieved the same effect by letting the Germans do the dirty work. On 1 August 1944, as the Red Army approached Warsaw, the poorly armed resistance there launched an urban insurrection against Nazi occupation that was the largest of the war. Although it only had arms for one week of fighting it fully expected imminent Russian assistance. But Stalin’s attitude was immediately hostile. The rising, he wrote, “does not inspire confidence” and was “a reckless and terrible adventure”.
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Not only did the Red Army halt its advance but Russia put obstacles in the way of a British-US airlift of supplies for the rebels, refusing refuelling rights to their planes.

In Italy the change in Allied policy also occurred in late 1944. An Anglo-American army had control in the south but Germany held the north. Since the summer of 1944 it faced what the Wehrmacht commander Kesselring called “unlimited guerrilla warfare”. The partisans fought 218 pitched battles and destroyed hundreds of locomotives and bridges.
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Fifteen republics were established in liberated areas at the same time. Yet on 10 November the Commander of the Allied Forces announced on open airwaves that the resistance should stand down and go home.
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To publicly disassociate itself in the very midst of battle amounted, in the words of a prominent resistance leader, to “an attempt on the part of the Allied command to eliminate the Italian liberation movement”.
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The critical moment for France had occurred a little earlier. Inspired by the Allied D-Day landing in June 1944, the resistance, backed by waves of strikes, intensified the pressure on the German forces occupying Paris. By August, Germany was losing control of the capital. At that moment the officially recognised leader of the Free French in London, General de Gaulle, ordered Parisians to: “Return to work immediately and maintain order until the Allies arrive”.
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This threw the Germans a lifeline and an enraged resistance fighter commented: “It was impossible to imagine a greater divorce between the action sustained by the masses and the coterie which had positioned itself between them and the enemy”.
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The case of Yugoslavia was an exception to this pattern. In the situations considered so far there was only one wing of the Allies decisively involved militarily with each particular resistance movement. For Greece, Italy and France this meant the Western Allies. With Poland it was Russia. In the case of Yugoslavia, Tito managed to balance the Western Allies and Russia by using imperialist rivalry between them. Britain and the US had belatedly supplied Tito while the Red Army was involved in
the liberation of Belgrade. For one wing to have openly sabotaged the resistance would have given political advantage to the other.

As we have seen, resistance movements in the Far East lacked Allied patronage and so there was no period of cooperation, only hostility. With the exception of the crushing of Quit India there was little the Allies could do practically as long as the Axis ruled the territories in which they operated. This situation changed in August 1945. In Vietnam the collapse of Japan opened the way to a mass uprising which the Viet Minh came to head. The revolution swept all before it in the north, partly because here China’s weak and corrupt Kuomintang government had been allocated responsibility by the Allies and was in no position to exercise control. However, Britain was assigned the south and General Gracey described his arrival in these terms: “I was welcomed on arrival by the Viet Minh who said ‘Welcome’ and all that sort of thing. It was a very unpleasant situation, and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously Communists”.
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Using British troops, a ragbag of forces including Vichy and even Waffen SS soldiers, the revolutionary movement was blocked and the country prepared for the return of the French.

In Indonesia resistance was late to develop. The Japanese promised Indonesian independence in the future and under Sukarno’s leadership the nationalist movement cooperated passively. Tokyo’s defeat ended these hopes and under considerable pressure from a revolutionary movement of youth, the Pemuda, he was forced to declare independence. In 1945 the Dutch were in no position to retake their colony and turned to Britain to accomplish this. Britain, however, found itself overstretched. To bolster its fighting strength Japanese forces were enlisted! There followed a concerted attempt to crush Indonesian independence. Thousands were killed in pitched battles such as at Semarang where the Japanese fought and Surabaya where the British attacked the population.

Although by 1945 the Axis was defeated that did not mean a return to pre-war conditions. In this, the greatest of all total wars, Allied success had relied on the energy of the mass of the people not just in resistance movements but in official armies and on the home front in places like Britain and the US. Where the Axis occupied, official rule had been disrupted and the vacuum filled by unofficial resistance organisations. Therefore the idea that establishment rule was inevitable and there was
no alternative to capitalism was questioned. In two broad arcs stretching from Beijing through Hanoi to Jakarta and Delhi and then from Athens through Belgrade to northern Italy and Paris the masses, many of them armed, were challenging for control.

Resistance movements by necessity could not arise using conventional organisational methods or routine bureaucracy. But in conditions of secrecy and illegality no leader could conjure up a movement by decree. When the Gestapo and SS were hunting down all opposition ruthlessly, self-motivated initiatives from below based on improvisation, rank-and-file commitment, courage and self-sacrifice were vitally necessary components. However, if by definition these were an almost classic expression of spontaneity, it was equally true that military effectiveness required centralised leadership. Individual heroism was no substitute for unified organised operations.

Spontaneity and leadership, decentralisation and centralism, which to an anarchist or autonomist appear to be inimical, were absolutely complementary and absolutely necessary. The historical record confirms this. Those resistance movements that failed to engage the masses through democratic participation and radical programmes withered on the vine. The Chetniks in Yugoslavia and EDES in Greece were good examples. Conversely, despite the deeply democratic methods employed by resistance movements (such as election of officers, no special pay for higher ranks, the overlap of civilian and soldier roles, involvement and equality for women), every one had a defined leadership. The actions of this group became critical at the end of the war when the ultimate meaning and outcome of years of titanic struggle were to be determined.