National Post (National Edition)
WHO REALLY WON THE SECOND WORLD WAR?
POLL SHOWS IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK
Who really won the Second World War? Maybe the best answer is the one attributed to the Chinese premier Chou En-lai, who, when asked about the effects of the French Revolution, said: “Too soon to tell.” (Like most irresistible historical one-liners, this one was probably never really delivered.)
A few months back, with the U.K. news full of disclosures about the semi-mysterious Skripal poisonings, British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson complained that Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely to use this summer’s FIFA World Cup as a political stage, much as Hitler used the 1936 Olympics. Russia’s U.K. ambassador retorted that “Nobody has the right to insult the Russian people, who defeated Nazism and lost more than 25 million people, by comparing our country to Nazi Germany.” Since we’re in a soccer context anyway, maybe we should refer to that response as an own goal. Equating criticism of a head of state with an “insult” to an entire “people” is, Godwin help us, exactly the sort of rhetorical strategy one associates with the Nazis.
Anyway, Godwin’s Law itself, or a closely related corollary of it, soon set to work. Someone had brought up the Big War, and so it had to swallow up the discussion. The clever international polling firm Yougov did a quickie survey of one multiple-choice question: “Who do you think played the most important role in defeating the Nazis during World War 2?” Answers on the menu were “the Americans,” “the British,” and “the Russians.” If you wanted to answer “I think it was those Polish math fellas who cracked the Enigma cryptography machine before the war and made damn sure the French knew the details,” you just had to have the pollster check off “other.”
The answers to the survey given by British respondents were unsurprising. Fifty per cent of them said that the British had done the most to win the war in Europe. Only nine per cent favoured the Americans and 13 per cent the Russians. Respondents in the U.S. were similarly confident of a different, equally unsurprising answer: 47 per cent of Americans voted for themselves, while only nine per cent opted for Britain and 12 per cent for Russia.
The interesting answers came from Yougov offices in Germany and France, two countries that might be expected, in theory, to have a more objective view of the particular question. In Germany the Americans won, but the answers were a little more evenly balanced: 34 per cent said the U.S. had done the most, 22 per cent thought it was the Russians, and only seven per cent voted for Britain. (Sadly, Yougov did not report how this result broke down between the former East and West Germanys.) The French were much more united in their answer: 56 per cent of them voted for the Americans, with only 11 per cent crediting Britain and 15 per cent the Russians.
Yougov pointed out that a French polling firm, the Institut Français d’opinion Publique (IFOP), had conducted a similar survey in 1945. At that time, the magnitude of the Russian sacrifice was still at the forefront of every European’s thinking, and the U.S.S.R. as a government was at the height of its prestige. So in the IFOP survey, 57 per cent of the French said the Russians had played the most important role in the Allied victory, with the Americans getting a 20 per cent vote share and the British just 12 per cent.
Did this change in French opinion come about because historical scholarship has evolved, and the French, as an especially philosophical and argumentative people, have been keeping close track? Perhaps it cannot be ruled out; I have given a crude caricature of the French, but they have a funny way of living up to their caricatures. More likely it is a question of the French having remembered what everyone was deliberately forgetting in 1945: namely, the Soviet Union’s awful responsibility for colluding with the Third Reich and provoking the war in the first place.
Yet there is no “wrong” answer to Yougov’s poll question. If scholars of the war have come to agree on anything resembling an answer, it is precisely that there is no good one that can be squeezed into a single word. You pretty much have to write a book on the subject, and there are plenty on offer in the shops.
Britain’s conviction that Britain itself was most pivotal is not unfounded, even if it is an opinion only still held by the wider public on the island itself. Many Canadians would probably be prepared to endorse “the British” as the correct answer to “Who had the most important part in Allied victory?”, on the condition that the phrase “the British” is expanded to include the words “and their ginormous collection of colonies and territories.” Historical revisionism on the subject of the Second World War is ceaseless, but the subject of Empire has yet to break like a wave against the Old Country’s popular conviction that it “stood alone” against Hitler.
THERE IS NO ‘WRONG’ ANSWER TO Yougov’s POLL QUESTION.