PRISONERS OF HISTORY

WHAT MONUMENTS TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR TELL US ABOUT OUR HISTORY AND OURSELVES

Keith Lowe

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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Keith Lowe 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008339548

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Version: 2020-03-27

Dedication

For Creo

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Introduction

Part I – Heroes

1 Russia: ‘The Motherland Calls’, Volgograd

2 Russia and Poland: ‘Four Sleepers’ Monument, Warsaw

3 USA: Marine Corps Memorial, Arlington, Virginia

4 USA and the Philippines: Douglas MacArthur Landing Memorial, Leyte

5 UK: Bomber Command Memorial, London

6 Italy: Shrine to the Fallen, Bologna

Coda: The End of Heroism

Part II – Martyrs

7 Netherlands: National Monument, Amsterdam

8 China: Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

9 South Korea: Peace Statue, Seoul

10 USA and Poland: Katyn Memorial, Jersey City

11 Hungary: Monument for the Victims of German Occupation, Budapest

12 Poland: Auschwitz

Part III – Monsters

13 Slovenia: Monument to the Victims of All Wars, Ljubljana

14 Japan: Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo

15 Italy: Mussolini’s Tomb, Predappio

16 Germany: Hitler’s Bunker and the Topography of Terror, Berlin

17 Lithuania: Statue of Stalin, Grūtas Park

Coda: The Value of Monsters

Part IV – Apocalypse

18 France: Oradour-sur-Glane

19 Germany: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

20 Germany: Monument to the Victims of the Firestorm, Hamburg

21 Japan: A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, and Peace Statue, Nagasaki

Part V – Rebirth

22 United Nations: UN Security Council Chamber Mural, New York

23 Israel: Balcony at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

24 UK: Coventry Cathedral and the Cross of Nails

25 European Union: Liberation Route Europe

Conclusion

Footnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Maps

Introduction

In the summer of 2017, American state legislators began removing statues of Confederate heroes from the streets and squares outside public buildings. Nineteenth-century figures like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, who had fought for the right to keep black slaves, were no longer considered suitable role models for twenty-first-century Americans. And so they came down. All across America, to a chorus of protest and counter-protest, monument after monument was removed.

There was nothing unique about what happened in America: elsewhere, other monuments were also coming down. In 2015, after the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes from outside the University of Cape Town, there were calls for the elimination of all symbols of colonialism across South Africa. Soon the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign spread to other countries around the world, including the UK, Germany and Canada. In the same year, Islamic fundamentalists began destroying hundreds of ancient statues in Syria and Iraq on the grounds that they were idolatrous. Meanwhile, the national governments of Poland and Ukraine announced the wholesale removal of monuments to Communism. A wave of iconoclasm was sweeping the world.

I watched all this happening with great fascination, but also with a certain incredulity. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, such occurrences would have been unthinkable. Monuments everywhere were regarded merely as street furniture: they were convenient places to meet and hang out, but few people paid them much attention in themselves. Some were statues of forgotten old men, often with strange headgear and improbable moustaches; others were abstract shapes made of concrete or steel; but either way we did not really understand them. There was certainly no point in calling for their removal, because the majority of people did not care enough about them to make any kind of fuss. But in the past few years, objects that were once all but invisible have suddenly become the centre of attention. Something important seems to have changed.

At the same time as tearing down some of our old monuments, we continue to build new ones. In 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in central Baghdad became one of the defining images of the Iraq War. But within two years of the statue’s destruction, a new monument had taken its place: a sculpture of an Iraqi family holding aloft the sun and the moon. For the artists who designed it, the monument represented Iraq’s hopes for a new society characterised by peace and freedom – hopes that were almost immediately dashed in the face of renewed corruption, extremism and violence.

Similar changes are taking place all over the world. In America, statues of Robert E. Lee are gradually being replaced by monuments to Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. In South Africa, the statues of Cecil Rhodes have come down, and monuments to Nelson Mandela have gone up. In eastern Europe, statues of Lenin and Marx make way for depictions of Thomas Masaryk, Józef Piłsudski and other nationalist heroes.

Some of our newest monuments are truly vast in scale, especially in parts of Asia. At the end of 2018, for example, India unveiled a brand new statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who was an important figure in the nation’s independence movement during the 1930s and 1940s. Standing at 182 metres (almost 600 feet), it is now the tallest statue in the world. To create such gigantic structures, at such huge cost, implies an incredible level of self-confidence. These are not temporary structures: they have been designed to last hundreds of years. And yet who is to say that they will fare any better than the statues of Lenin or Rhodes or any of the other figures that once seemed so permanent?

It seems to me that several things are going on here at once. Monuments reflect our values, and every society deceives itself that its values are eternal: it is for this reason that we cast those values in stone and set them upon a pedestal. But when the world changes, our monuments – and the values that they represent – remain frozen in time. Today’s world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and monuments erected decades or even centuries ago no longer represent the values we hold dear.

The debates currently taking place over our monuments are almost always about identity. In the days when the world was dominated by old white men, it made sense to raise statues in their honour; but in today’s world of multiculturalism and greater gender equality, it is not surprising that people are beginning to ask questions. Where are all the statues of women? In a country like South Africa, with its majority black population, why should there be so many statues of white Europeans? In the USA, which has a population as diverse as any on the planet, why is there not more diversity on display in its public spaces?

But beneath these debates lies something even more fundamental: we can’t seem to make up our minds what role our communal history should play in our lives. On the one hand we see history as the solid foundation upon which our world has been built. We imagine it as a benign force, offering us opportunities to learn from the past and progress to our future. History is the very basis of our identity. But on the other hand we view it as a force that stultifies us, holding us hostage to centuries of outdated tradition. It leads us down the same old paths, to make the same mistakes again and again. When left unchallenged, history can ensnare us. It becomes a trap, from which escape seems impossible.

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our society. Every generation longs to free itself from the tyranny of history; and yet every generation knows instinctively that without it they are nothing, because history and identity are so intertwined.

This book is about our monuments, and what they really tell us about our history and identity. I have picked twenty-five memorials from around the world which say something important about the societies that erected them. Some of these memorials are now massive tourist attractions: millions of people visit them every year. Each of them is controversial. Each tells a story. Some deliberately try to hide more than they reveal, but in doing so show us more about ourselves than they ever intended. What I most want to demonstrate is that none of these monuments is really about the past at all: rather, they are an expression of a history that is still alive today, and which continues to govern our lives whether we like it or not.

The monuments I have chosen are all dedicated to one period in our communal past: the Second World War. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is that, of all our memorials, these are the only ones that seem to have bucked the current trend of iconoclasm. In other words, these monuments continue to say something about who we are in a way that so many of our other monuments no longer do.

Very few war monuments have been torn down in recent years. In fact, quite the opposite has happened: we are building new war memorials at an unprecedented rate. This is not just the case in Europe and America, but also in Asian countries like the Philippines and China. Why should this be? It is not as if our war leaders were any less controversial than some of the figures whose statues have recently been taken down. British and French leaders were just as much champions of colonialism as Cecil Rhodes ever was; American leaders still presided over a racially segregated army; and men from all the Allied forces engaged in acts that would now be considered war crimes. Their attitudes towards women were not always enlightened either. One of our most famous images of the end of the war, Life magazine’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square, celebrates what we now know to be a sexual assault. Our collective memory of the Second World War seems to be able to skip over these issues in a way that our memory of other periods can’t.

In order to get to the bottom of these questions, I have divided our Second World War monuments into five broad categories. In the first part of the book I will look at some of our most famous monuments to the heroes of the war. I will show how these are the most vulnerable of all our Second World War memorials, and the only ones that show any sign of being toppled or removed. Part II will explore our memorials to the martyrs of the war, and Part III will look at some of the memorial spaces that have been carved out for the war’s main villains. The interplay between these three categories is as important as each category itself: the heroes cannot exist without the villains, and neither can the martyrs. In Part IV I will describe memorials to the apocalyptic destruction of the war; and in Part V I will describe some of those to the rebirth that came afterwards. These five categories reflect and reinforce one another. They have created a kind of mythological framework that protects them from the iconoclasm that has ripped through other parts of our collective memory.

I have tried to include a wide variety of monuments, if only to represent the sheer diversity of places that have been used to contain our memories of the past. So I will describe not only figurative statues and abstract sculptures, but also shrines, tombs, ruins, murals, parks and architectural features. Some of the monuments I have chosen were created in the immediate aftermath of the war, while others are much newer – indeed, some are still under construction as I write. Some have an intensely local meaning, while others are of national or even international significance. I have tried to include monuments from many different parts of the world – so, for example, I have included memorials in Israel, China and the Philippines as well as those in the UK, Russia and the USA.

There are great advantages in writing about a period that everyone understands – or, at least, thinks they understand. The Second World War affected every corner of the globe, and most nations around the world commemorate it in one way or another. It is a great cultural equaliser. And yet, as will quickly become apparent in this book, the war is remembered in vastly different ways in different nations. What better way is there to understand the differences between us and our neighbours than to be confronted by our conflicting views on something that we always thought was a shared experience?

Lastly, I have concentrated on Second World War monuments quite simply because of their quality. We sometimes tend to think of monuments as solid, grey, boring, but the sculptures in this book are some of the most dramatic and emotive pieces of public art anywhere in the world. Beneath all the granite and bronze is a mix of everything that makes us who we are – power, glory, bravery, fear, oppression, greatness, hope, love and loss.

We celebrate these and a thousand other qualities in the anticipation that they might free us from the tyranny of the past. And yet, through our desire to immortalise them in stone, they inevitably end up expressing the very forces that continue to keep us prisoners of our history.

Part I

We live today in an age of scandal. Our media is so often dominated by stories of corruption among our politicians, our business and religious leaders, our sports stars and screen idols that sometimes it can feel difficult to believe in heroes any more.

It has not always been like this. According to popular memory at least, we once knew exactly who our heroes were. In 1945 we built monuments to the men and women who fought for us in the Second World War, and we continue to build such monuments even today. These monuments speak to us of a simpler time, when people knew right from wrong, and were willing to do their duty for the sake of a greater good.

But how accurate are these memories? Were our heroes really any stronger, braver, or more dutiful than we ourselves are? If we subjected them to the same scrutiny that our politicians and celebrities receive today, would we still be able to see them as heroes?

Our veneration of the Second World War generation says a great deal about how we view our history, and the hold that it still has over us today. In the following pages I will take a look at some of our monuments to heroism around the world, and ask what they say not only about the past, but also about today’s values and ideals. I will also explore what happens when those values change over time. Can our heroes ever live up to our expectations? And what happens when our cosy memories of the past clash with a much colder historical reality?

1
Russia: ‘The Motherland Calls’, Volgograd

The Second World War was probably the greatest human catastrophe the world has ever seen. Historians have always struggled to find words that can convey even a glimpse of its total scale. We give endless statistics – more than 100 million soldiers mobilised, more than 60 million people killed, more than $1.6 trillion squandered – but such numbers are so large that they are meaningless to most of us.

Monuments, memorials and museums do not rely on statistics: they find other ways to suggest the scale of wartime events. A single well-chosen symbol can often hint at this far better than any words. For example, who can look at the mountain of shoes on display in the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz–Birkenau without imagining the host of corpses from which those shoes were stolen? Sometimes even a tiny object can bring to mind something gigantic. In the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum there is a display of clocks and watches that all stopped at the exact moment of the atomic blast. The atom bomb, they seem to say, was so great that it had the power to stop time.

But perhaps the most effective way that memorials convey the vastness of wartime events is also the simplest: through their own sheer size. Many of the memorials in this book are larger than life. Some are truly gigantic. There is a simple rule of thumb that holds true for most of them: the bigger the event being commemorated, the bigger the monument.

This chapter tells the story of one of the largest of them all: the huge statue that stands on top of Mamayev Kurgan, in the city of Volgograd in Russia. Its size tells us a great deal – not only about the Second World War, but also about the Russian psyche, and the bonds that continue to hold it prisoner.

Mamayev Kurgan is not the site of a single monument, but of a complex of monuments, each more gigantic than the last. The first time I came here, I felt I was entering a realm of titans. At the foot of the hill stands a huge sculpture of a bare-chested man clutching a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. He seems to rise out of the very rock, torso rippling, as tall as a three-storey building. Beyond him, on either side of the steps that lead to the summit, are relief sculptures of giant soldiers springing out of the ruined walls as if in the midst of battle. Farther up the hill is the gigantic figure of a grieving mother, more than twice the size of my house. She is hunched over the body of her dead son, sobbing into a large pool of water, called the ‘Lake of Tears’.

The dozens of statues arranged in this park are all giants: not one of them is under six metres (20 feet) tall, and some of them depict heroes three or four times that size. And yet they are dwarfed by the single statue that rises above them all, on the summit of the hill. Here, overlooking the Volga, stands a colossal representation of Mother Russia beckoning to her children to come and fight for her. Her mouth is open in battle cry, her hair and dress fluttering in the wind; and in her right hand she holds a vast sword pointing up into the sky. From her feet to the tip of her sword she stands 85 metres (280 feet) high. She is nearly twice as tall, and forty times as heavy, as the Statue of Liberty in New York City. When she was first unveiled in 1967, she was the largest statue in the world.

This memorial, entitled ‘The Motherland Calls!’, is one of Russia’s most iconic statues. It was the creation of Soviet sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich, who spent years designing and building it. It contains around 2,500 metric tonnes of metal and 5,500 tonnes of concrete. The sword alone weighs 14 tonnes. So huge was the statue that Vuchetich was obliged to collaborate with a structural engineer, Nikolai Nikitin, to ensure that it did not collapse under its own weight. Holes had to be drilled into the sword to reduce the threat of the wind catching it and causing the whole structure to sway.

Were this monument in Italy or France it would appear absurdly grandiose, but here on the banks of the Volga, in the city that was once called Stalingrad, it feels quietly appropriate. The battle that took place here in 1942 dwarfs anything that happened in the West. It began with the greatest German bombardment of the war, and progressed with attacks and counterattacks by more than a dozen entire armies. Within the city itself, soldiers fought from street to street, and even from room to room, in a landscape of shattered houses. Over the course of five months around two million men lost their lives, their health or their liberty. The combined casualties of this one battle were greater than the casualties that Britain and America together suffered during the whole of the war.

As one stands on the summit of Mamayev Kurgan in the shadow of the gigantic statue of the Motherland, one can feel the weight of all this history. It is oppressive even for a foreigner. But for many Russians this place is sacred. The word ‘Kurgan’ in Russian means a tumulus or burial mound. The hill is an ancient site dedicated to a fourteenth-century warlord, but in the wake of the greatest battle of the greatest war in history, it carries a new symbolism. This place was one of the major battlegrounds of 1942, and an unknown number of soldiers and civilians are buried here. Even today, when walking on the hill, it is possible to find fragments of metal and bone buried in the soil. The Motherland statue stands, both figuratively and literally, upon a mountain of corpses.

The scale of the war in Russia is one reason why the monuments on Mamayev Kurgan are so huge, but it is not the only reason – in fact, it is not even the main reason. The statues of muscular heroes and weeping mothers might be huge, but it is the giantess on the summit of the hill that dominates them all. It is important to remember that this is a representation not of the war, but of the Motherland. Its message is simple: no matter how great the battle, and no matter how great the enemy, the Motherland is greater still. Her colossal size is supposed to be a comfort to the struggling soldiers and weeping mothers, a reminder that for all their sacrifice, they are at least a part of something powerful and magnificent. This is the true meaning of Mamayev Kurgan.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the people of the Soviet Union had little to console them. Not only were they traumatised by loss, but they also faced an uncertain future. Russians did not benefit economically from the war as the Americans did: the violence had left their economy in ruins. Nor did Russians win any new freedoms: despite widespread hopes of a political thaw after 1945, Stalinist repression soon started up all over again. Life in Russia after the war was grim.

The only consolation offered to Russian and other Soviet people was that their country had proven itself at last to be a truly great nation. In 1945, the USSR possessed the largest army the world has ever seen. It dominated not only the vast Eurasian land mass, but also the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Second World War had not only restored the country’s borders, but extended them, both to the west and to the east, and Soviet influence now stretched deep into the heart of Europe. Before the war, the Soviet Union had been a second-rate power, weakened by internal upheaval. After the war, it was a superpower.

The Motherland statue on Mamayev Kurgan was designed to be proof of all this. It was built in the 1960s, when the USSR was at the height of its strength. It stood as a warning to anyone who dared attack the Soviet Union, but also as a symbol of reassurance to the Soviet people. The giant, it declared, would always protect them.

For the Russian citizens who first stood on the summit of this hill with the Motherland statue at their backs, the vistas looked endless. Everything to the west of them for a thousand miles was Soviet territory. To the east they could travel through nine time zones without once leaving their country. Even the heavens seemed to belong to them: the first man in space was a Russian, and the first woman too. It is impossible to look up at the Motherland statue without also gazing beyond, to the endless skies above her.

Since those days, Russia has never stopped building war memorials. Many of them are on a similar scale to those in Volgograd. In 1974, for example, a statue 42 metres (138 feet) high of a Soviet soldier was erected in Murmansk, in memory of the men who died during the defence of Arctic Russia in July 1941. In the early 1980s, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union, a second Motherland statue was erected in Kiev. (Like the statue on Mamayev Kurgan, it was designed by Vuchetich. Including its plinth, it stands over 100 metres, or around 320 feet, tall.) And in 1985, in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, a 79-metre-high victory monument (around 260 feet tall) was erected in Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia.

All these statues and monuments were meant to be symbols of power and confidence. But a generation after the Motherland statue in Volgograd was inaugurated, Soviet power began to waver. In the 1980s, Eastern Bloc countries like Poland and East Germany began to pull away from Soviet influence, culminating in the collapse of Communism in those countries in 1989. Then pieces of the Soviet Union itself began to break off: first Lithuania in March 1990, followed in quick succession by thirteen other states in the Baltic, eastern Europe, the Caucasus and central Asia. The giant was crumbling. The dissolution of the USSR was finally announced on 26 December 1991.

The sense of despair felt by many Russians during this period was palpable. Madeleine Albright, America’s Secretary of State at the end of the 1990s, tells the story of meeting a Russian man who complained that ‘We used to be a superpower, but now we’re Bangladesh with missiles.’ For decades, national greatness had been the only consolation for all the loss that men like him had suffered throughout the century. Now this too had been taken away.

In such an atmosphere, Russia’s gargantuan war memorials began to look less like symbols of power, and more like Ozymandias in the famous poem by Shelley: relics of past glories, destined to be swallowed, slowly but surely, by the sands of time. But this did not stop the Russian authorities from building them. On the contrary: Russia has never stopped celebrating the glories of the Second World War. In 1995, for example, a brand new ‘Museum of the Great Patriotic War’ was opened in Moscow. In front of it stands a monument that is even taller than the statue on Mamayev Kurgan: in fact, standing at 141.8 metres (or 465 feet) tall, it is the tallest Second World War memorial anywhere in the world. Other monuments followed. In April 2007, Belgorod, Kursk and Oryol were declared ‘Cities of Military Glory’ because of the role they had played during the war, and brand new obelisks were erected in each location. The following October, five more cities were given the title, and five more obelisks erected. Within just another five years, more than forty cities across Russia were honoured in the same way, with brand new monuments springing up from Vyborg to Vladivostok.

Why do the Russians continue to commemorate the war in this manner? More than seventy-five years have passed since the final days of the conflict. Is it not time to lay it to rest?

There are a couple of possible explanations for the country’s seemingly limitless addiction to massive Second World War monuments. The first is that the trauma caused by the war was so great that Russians simply cannot forget it. They feel compelled to tell the stories of the war again and again, in the same way that individuals who have experienced trauma often have flashbacks. These new memorials, each seemingly bigger than the last, are Russia’s way of coming to terms with its past.

I’m sure that this is true, but it is also a little simplistic. For example, it does not explain why the memorials are growing and replicating now more than ever. Is there something about life in Russia today that triggers these concrete flashbacks? I can’t help feeling that there must be a renewed sense of instability, or vulnerability, which is driving Russians to insist ever more stridently upon their wartime heroism. In other words, the monuments that they are erecting today have as much to do with the present as with the past.

Or perhaps this is simply about nation-building. Russia is not the country that it once was. It has lost an empire, and not yet found a new role for itself in the world. For many Russians, the building of war memorials serves as a reminder of the status that their country once had, and perhaps also gives a sense of hope that, one day soon, Russia might rise again. The bigger the monument, the greater the sense of pride – and the greater the nostalgia. The glorification of the war has become a central pillar of Vladimir Putin’s programme to forge a new sense of national identity.

This too can be felt at Mamayev Kurgan. During the 1990s, when Russian power was crumbling, the Motherland statue also began to fall apart. Decaying pipes around the ‘Lake of Tears’ began to leak water into the hill around the statue, making the soil unstable. By the year 2000, deep cracks had begun to appear in the statue’s shoulders. A few years later, reports emerged that it was listing 20 centimetres to one side. The cash-strapped Russian government kept promising to pay for reconstruction work, but the money never arrived. Nobody knew whether this official neglect was due to Russia’s new-found poverty, or its new-found ambivalence towards its Soviet past.

In recent years, however, the monument has had a new lease of life. When I visited in 2018, the Motherland statue had just been repaired. The other monuments in downtown Volgograd had also been given a facelift, and the whole of the city’s Victory Park was closed for refurbishment. In the central square, which is named the ‘Square of the Fallen Heroes’, school children were practising their marching for a ceremony to honour the Stalingrad dead.

There is pride here, and sorrow, in equal measure. When you climb the hill today, you see people from all over Russia who have come to this place to pay their respects. Families bring children to teach them about the heroism of their great-grandfathers. Young women pose for photos in front of the Motherland statue, and carry red carnations to lay at the feet of the monuments. Military men come in full dress uniform, their medals clanking as they climb the steps.

None of these people can escape the history that has forged them, nor the longing for greatness that has been so integral to their nation’s consciousness since 1945. For better or worse, they continue to live in the shadow of the great statue that stands on top of the hill.

The ‘Four Sleepers’ monument in 2010, before it was taken down

2
Russia and Poland: ‘Four Sleepers’ Monument, Warsaw

Every nation takes pride in its heroes. The monuments we create to those heroes have a special place in our hearts, because they are representative of all we hold dear: they show us at our very best, with all our most attractive qualities on display. But how we would like to think of ourselves is not always the same as how we really are. And neither is it the same as how we are viewed by others. Our monuments may look glorious to us, but to other people, with other values, they may look distinctly unheroic, even grotesque.

The Russian people are rightly proud of their Second World War heroes, but one does not have to travel far from Russia to find a very different narrative about the role played by that country during the conflict. In neighbouring states like Ukraine and Poland, the Russians are often regarded not as heroes but as colonisers. This narrative too is played out in the story of Europe’s monuments. And one monument in particular shows how polarised our different versions of history have become.

* * *

The Monument to Brotherhood in Arms was built in 1945, and erected in Warsaw at the end of that year. It was designed by a Soviet army engineer, Major Alexander Nienko, but was constructed by a group of Polish sculptors. It depicted three larger-than-life soldiers on top of a six-metre plinth (around 20 foot), striding forward, weapons in hand. Standing at the corners of the plinth were four further statues – two Soviet soldiers and two Polish ones – their heads bowed in sombre contemplation. As a result of wartime shortages, the original statues were made of painted plaster; but two years later they were replaced with bronze casts made from melted-down German ammunition. On the plinth itself were inscribed the words: ‘Glory to the heroes of the Soviet Army, comrades in arms, who gave their lives for the freedom and independence of the Polish nation’.

This monument was meant to depict a new era of friendship between Poland and the Soviet Union. The two countries had shared an extremely difficult history, stretching right back into Tsarist times. They had actually begun the war on opposite sides: the USSR had initially allied itself with Hitler, and had taken part in the invasion of Poland in 1939. But two years later, when the Nazis had turned against them, the Soviets had sought to build a new relationship with the Poles. They released Polish prisoners and exiles, and allowed them to reform an army. As a consequence, some 200,000 Polish troops fought alongside their former enemies in 1945. The liberation of Warsaw was carried out by Polish soldiers and Soviet soldiers fighting together.

The Monument to Brotherhood in Arms therefore fulfilled several functions at once. It was an acknowledgement of the genuine debt that Poland owed to the Soviets: had it not been for the sacrifices of the Red Army, Poland would not even have existed in 1945. It promoted hopes for the future: if Poland and the USSR could collaborate in wartime, then why not in peacetime too? And, of course, it was a work of political propaganda. The soldiers who stand on the top of the plinth are Soviets, with the Polish soldiers below them: from now on, as far as the Soviets were concerned, that would be the correct hierarchy.

This was the first monument to be built in Warsaw after the war, but it was soon followed by others. All over the country, similar memorials began to appear. There were sculptures celebrating Polish-Soviet friendship, obelisks commemorating their joint victory over the Nazis, plaques dedicated to their common war dead, tombs, cemeteries, everlasting flames. According to a list drawn up in 1994, around 570 monuments dedicated to fallen Soviet soldiers were built across Poland in the aftermath of the war. This was all part of an official drive to build on the wartime collaboration between Poland and the USSR and forge a new, Communist future together.

Unfortunately, none of these memorials inspired anything like the love and devotion that similar memorials did in the USSR. Since they celebrated the exploits and sacrifices of foreign people, they were not monuments in which Poles themselves could take much personal pride – at most they were monuments to gratitude and friendship. But when that gratitude ran dry and that friendship turned sour, the monuments began to take on an altogether darker meaning.

Most Poles knew very well where they stood in any partnership with the USSR. They saw these symbols of power and glory and began to suspect that it was not only the Nazis who had been ground beneath the wheels of Soviet greatness. Soon they began to take out their frustrations on those symbols. Soviet monuments were often vandalised, defaced, and covered with nationalist graffiti. They were given derogatory nicknames based on popular memories of the way that Soviet soldiers had behaved during the liberation: names like ‘the looters’ memorial’ or ‘the tomb of the unknown rapist’. The Monument to Brotherhood in Arms in Warsaw was no exception. People joked that the statues at each corner were not hanging their heads in mourning, but because they had fallen asleep on duty. Thereafter, the memorial was popularly known as Czterech Śpiących, or ‘The Four Sleepers’.[fn1]

Over the next forty years, the monument continued to stand on its plinth in Warsaw’s Praga district. It was occasionally used as a site of remembrance for the war or as a venue for celebrating the more general victory of Communism in Europe. On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, for example, the Warsaw Philharmonic played here, while officials laid flowers at the foot of the monument.

But in 1989, everything changed. During that extraordinary year, Communist governments across eastern Europe began to collapse. The Berlin Wall was breached, dictatorships were toppled, and Soviet monuments everywhere were torn down. For a while the world’s newspapers regularly carried photographs of statues falling: Romania’s Petru Groza, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Poland’s Bolesław Bierut and, all over Europe, Lenin after Lenin after Lenin.

Remarkably, the ‘Four Sleepers’ monument in Warsaw survived these years unscathed. In 1992 the local authority briefly considered dismantling it; but the idea caused such disagreement – especially when one of the artists who had helped to create it, Stefan Momot, stood up in a meeting to defend it – that the proposal was eventually dropped.

Fifteen years later, however, another attempt was made to remove it, this time on practical grounds. Transport experts were considering the creation of a new tram stop on the exact location of the monument as part of a city-wide transport improvement plan. The tram idea was eventually abandoned, but four years later another transport plan insisted that the ‘Four Sleepers’ had to be moved to make way for a new underground station. The authorities promised that it would be put back just as soon as the construction of the station was finished. So, in 2011, it was taken down and transported to a conservation workshop in Michałowice.

This, it appeared, was exactly the opportunity that opponents of the memorial had been waiting for. Members of the Law and Justice Party, a right-wing populist movement, were especially vocal. They argued that the monument should never be allowed back to the square, on the grounds that it glorified a foreign power that had subjugated Poland for more than forty years. They called the ‘Four Sleepers’ a monument to shame, which painted the Polish people as passive bystanders in a Soviet story. It, and all monuments like it, was an insult to Poland, and a falsification of Polish history.

Other figures joined in with the vilification of the monument. Various historians and former dissidents pointed out that the ‘Four Sleepers’ stood at the centre of a district that had been filled with institutions of state repression. The Warsaw Office of Public Security, a provincial detention centre, the headquarters of the NKVD and a city prison had all stood within 100 metres (328 feet) of the monument. ‘In each of these places “the enemies of the state” … were interrogated and tortured,’ wrote Dr Andrzej Zawistowski of the Polish Institute for National Remembrance. For such people, the monument represented not only the prison of history, but actual prisons, where real people had been persecuted.

And yet many others were willing to defend the monument. Socialist politicians argued that the memorial did not glorify Stalinism at all, or commemorate the Soviet leaders who repressed Poland, but merely the ordinary foot-soldiers, who were often conscripted into the Red Army by force. Ageing veterans pointed out that 600,000 of these ‘Sachas and Vanyas’ had died on Polish soil, and that Polish soldiers were also represented on the monument.

The controversy raged for four years, and involved countless articles in the press, petitions, media debates, demonstrations and acts of vandalism. In 2013, the local authority carried out an opinion poll about whether the monument should stay or go. The results seemed quite emphatic: only 8 per cent wanted the monument to be destroyed, and 12 per cent wanted it moved to a far-off location, but 72 per cent wanted it to be put back in the square. Opponents countered that the sample size had been less than a thousand, and that most people only wanted to keep the monument because it was something they had grown used to. If Poland was to look to the future it needed to free itself from this toxic history.

In the end, it was the nationalist faction that won out. In 2015, the city council announced that it would not return the ‘Four Sleepers’ monument to Wileński Square after all. Three years later, it was announced that it had been donated to a new Museum of Polish History in the north of the city. According to museum staff, it will finally be on display in 2021 – some ten years after it was removed from its original site.

What is a hero? What is a hero for? Russians see the deconstruction of their war heroes as a personal affront, but heroes are much more than mere representations of actual people; they are also representations of ideas. If you no longer agree with the ideas, then perhaps the heroes must come down.

For Russians, statues like the ‘Four Sleepers’ represent bravery, liberation, brotherhood – and, of course, greatness. But for Poles and other eastern Europeans, they represent something entirely different: subjugation, humiliation, repression. The truth is that they represent both sets of ideas at the same time, but the emotions surrounding these monuments are so strong that many people are simply not willing to entertain such ambiguity.

The ‘Four Sleepers’ monument is a single casualty in a war over the memory of 1945 that has swept across Poland in recent years. Dozens of Soviet war monuments were pulled down or destroyed in the exuberant atmosphere of 1989, and dozens more were removed by local councils in the years that followed. In 2017, the national government finally embarked on an official programme to remove those that remained. This went against an agreement made in 1994 between Russia and Poland to respect one another’s ‘places of memory’. But the Polish government, which by now was dominated by the populist Law and Justice Party, stated that all they were really doing was removing the symbols of foreign power from their towns and cities: they promised not to touch any memorials that marked genuine burial places.

It is not only Poland that has embarked on such a programme. In 2015, for example, the Ukrainian government also passed a law aimed at the complete de-Sovietisation of the country. It included the removal of all Communist symbols and statues of Communist figures, and the renaming of thousands of streets, towns and villages. This was carried out quite quickly. By 2018, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, Volodymyr Vyatrovych, was able to announce that the de-Communisation of the nation had been achieved.

Similar controversies have hit Soviet war memorials all over eastern and central Europe. The Monument to the Heroes of the Red Army in Vienna is regularly vandalised. The Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia has repeatedly been daubed with paint – sometimes in jest, but more often in protest over recent actions by the Russian government. The Victory Monument in Riga was bombed in 1997 by a far-right Latvian nationalist group, and since then veterans of the Second World War have repeatedly called for it to be taken down. In Estonia, in 2007, the Bronze Soldier memorial to the ‘liberators of Tallinn’ was removed from the city centre and relocated in the military cemetery a few kilometres away, sparking two days of protest by Tallinn’s ethnic Russian minority.

Many people across eastern Europe regard this iconoclasm as the only way to free their countries from the burden of their Communist past. Given all that they have suffered, this is quite understandable; but, as any psychologist will tell you, history is not so easily escaped. As will become apparent, these people seem to be deconstructing one prison only to build themselves another.

In the meantime, most ordinary Russians struggle to understand why they should be so hated in eastern Europe. They see the dismantling of monuments to their war heroes as a personal affront. But since they no longer rule in eastern Europe, there is nothing they can do about it.

3
USA: Marine Corps Memorial, Arlington, Virginia

If Russia’s monumental heroes reflect that nation’s longing for greatness, what of the other post-war superpower? How do Americans tend to view their heroes?

In my working life, I often travel to different parts of the world giving lectures about the Second World War. In one particular lecture I talk about America’s mythology of heroism. It is a subject that fascinates me because, to a European like me, it seems so extreme. Americans sometimes seem to regard their war heroes as if they were not human at all, but figures from legend, or even saints. President Reagan spoke of them as a Christian army, impelled by faith and blessed by God. President Clinton called them ‘freedom’s warriors’, who had immortalised themselves by fighting ‘the forces of darkness’. TV journalist Tom Brokaw famously proclaimed them ‘the greatest generation any society has ever produced’. How can any real-life soldier or veteran possibly live up to such expectations?

I have noticed that reactions to my lecture differ depending on where I deliver it. Whenever I’m in America, my audience tends to listen respectfully in silence: some of them agree with me, and some of them don’t. But when I give this lecture anywhere in Europe, the audience tends to snigger. At one point, when I quote at length from a speech given by Bill Clinton to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, they sometimes laugh out loud. American rhetoric, to many Europeans, sounds ridiculous.

It is always nice to get a laugh when you’re speaking; but there is something about this particular laughter that worries me. Europeans often make fun of America’s insular view of the world, but they themselves are often equally ignorant of America. They don’t mean to be disrespectful; they simply can’t quite believe that anyone is serious when they speak about their war veterans in this way. But Americans are deadly serious. In the American consciousness, the role that their soldiers played during the Second World War has come to represent everything that is best about their country.

This gulf in understanding between Europeans and Americans is immediately apparent as soon as one looks at their war memorials. America makes monuments to its heroes; Europe much more often makes monuments to its victims. American monuments are triumphant; European ones are melancholy. American monuments are idealistic, while European ones – occasionally, at least – are more likely to be morally ambiguous.

If America does not understand Europe, it is because America never suffered as Europe or Asia did. The vast majority of Americans only ever experienced the war through the images brought home by film units and war photographers, which did not always give the most truthful or complete picture of what was taking place. Some of the most famous American monuments to the war are based on these photographs, and it is no wonder that they portray a rather idealistic view.

If Europe does not understand America, however, it is for very different reasons. Europeans have failed to grasp the fact that American depth of feeling about the war comes not from a sense of history, but from a sense of identity. The war is nothing but a screen upon which they have projected much deeper ideas and emotions that are right at the heart of the American psyche. In other words, when public figures in America wax lyrical about the war, they aren’t really talking about the war at all. This, as we shall see, is obvious as soon as one takes a closer look at their war memorials.

One of the best-loved monuments to American heroism during the Second World War is the Marine Corps memorial in Arlington, Virginia. It stands at the very heart of American power, not far from the Pentagon building, with an unrestricted view across the Potomac River to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the US Capitol. It is undeniably one of the most important monuments in the country.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a Second World War memorial at all – it is a memorial to all the marines who have fallen since the formation of the corps in 1775. But it was built in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and paid for by donations from marines who had served during that war. Furthermore, it is based on one of the most iconic images from 1945 – Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the moment when a group of marines raised a flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for the island of Iwo Jima.

The memorial depicts six soldiers, their weapons slung over their shoulders, standing on a patch of jagged, unforgiving ground. Like all the statues we have seen so far they are colossal – more than five times taller than an average man. The figure at the front of the group leans forward, his body almost horizontal, using all his weight to drive a gigantic flagpole into the ground. Those behind him are hunched together, trying also to lend their weight to the task. At the back of the group, one of the marines stretches upwards, his fingers not quite reaching the pole. Beneath them, on the black granite plinth, are Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz’s words summing up the performance of the Marines at Iwo Jima, ‘Uncommon valor was a common virtue’.

Like all good memorials, this one tells a story. However, it is a story with many layers, and to understand it properly, one needs to go right back to the beginning of the conflict.

America’s war began on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese launched their notorious attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. This remains one of the defining events of American history. For ninety minutes, hundreds of Japanese planes bombed American ships, airfields and port facilities, killing more than 2,400 people and wounding almost 1,200 more. Twenty-one ships were sunk, and 188 military aircraft destroyed. The attack came as a complete surprise, because the US Secretary of State did not receive a declaration of war until after it had begun. The sense of shock that this produced in American society is impossible to overstate. Its only recent parallel has been the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

The logic behind this military strike was simple. Japan wanted to take control of the whole Pacific region, and knew that in order to do so they would have to discourage America from stepping in. The Japanese leadership did not think that America had the stomach for a long war in the Pacific, and were willing to gamble that a quick, decisive victory would force them to negotiate a settlement. In other words, Pearl Harbor was not supposed to start a war with America; it was supposed to prevent one.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of US history could have told them that this was a risky strategy. America never gives up without a fight. Once they had recovered from their initial surprise, the American military responded with ruthless determination. Over the next three and a half years it clawed its way, step by step, back across the Pacific Ocean. It fought huge naval battles in the Coral Sea and at Midway; it launched submarine strikes against Japanese supply lines; it liberated one island group after another.

The Marines were often at the forefront of the action. The battles they fought to secure Guadalcanal, Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands and Palau were some of the most brutal of the whole war. At this time, Japanese soldiers were considered notorious for their viciousness and their refusal to surrender, and inflicted terrible casualties on the less experienced Americans. Before long, the US Marines began repaying them in kind, taking few prisoners, and occasionally massacring them after they had been disarmed. Reports and photographs of atrocities by either side rarely made it back home to America, because US censors wished to spare the public both the anguish and the shame of what was really going on.

Eventually, US forces advanced all the way to the shores of Japan. The first island they reached was Iwo Jima. After four days of savage fighting, a group of marines managed to fight their way to the top of Mount Suribachi, the highest point of the island. To signal that they had reached the summit, they attached a US flag to a length of piping and raised it. Later that day, a second group of marines brought a larger flag up to replace it, and war photographer Joe Rosenthal was there to capture the moment for posterity.

It is this second flag-raising that the Marine Corps Memorial immortalises in bronze. The sculpture is a study in determination. The effort required to plant the flag is plain to see: each one of the six figures appears to be straining every sinew. They are the personification of American grit. The sculpture is also a study in unity: these Americans are all working together in harmony, their hands placed along the same pole, their legs bent in parallel with one another. It is a study in violence – more so, perhaps, than any other American monument to the war. No Japanese soldiers are being killed here, but the force with which the six men are driving the flag into hostile foreign ground is at least suggestive of something darker, which the US censor never allowed the American people to see.

Most of all, however, this is a study in vengeance. The story that begins with Pearl Harbor ends with American troops raising their flag on Japanese soil. In this sense, it is as stark a warning as the statue of the Motherland in Volgograd: this is what happens to anyone who dares attack America.

All these qualities would have been keenly felt by those who stood before the memorial when it was first unveiled in November 1954. Three of the men depicted in the sculpture were present at the inauguration ceremony, as were the mothers of the other three, who had been killed shortly after Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph was taken. They and the 5,000 other attendees, many of whom had direct experience of the Pacific War, would have had good cause to nurture some of the darker emotions inspired by the monument.

But vengeance and grim determination are not qualities that explain the reverence with which the majority of Americans regard this monument. The thousands of people who come each week to pay their respects, or to watch one of the sunset parades that are performed in front of the monument during the summer months, are not here to celebrate violence. There is clearly something else going on.

To understand this, one must move one’s gaze from the figures at the front of the monument to those at the back. These men are not driving a spike into the soil, they are reaching their hands up, as if to heaven. Above them flies the US flag. The figure right at the back is trying to touch the flagpole, his outstretched fingers not quite reaching it. The effect is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s famous painting of Adam stretching his hand towards God in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Felix de Weldon, the artist who sculpted the memorial, explained the image in a speech at the inauguration in 1954. ‘The hands of these men reaching out,’ he said, are ‘groping for that which may be beyond one’s means to attain, needing assistance from the power above, that power which we all need in time of adversity, and without whose guidance our efforts might well be fruitless.’ This divine guidance is symbolised by the flag above them, which de Weldon called ‘the emblem of our unity, our power, our thoughts and purpose as a nation’.

In other words, the real subject of the sculpture is not the US Marines at all, nor the victory over the Japanese, nor anything else to do with the Second World War. It is the flag which gives the monument its real meaning. This symbol, with its fusion of God and nation, is the real reason why the memorial is so well loved in America.

If there is a gulf of understanding between Europeans and Americans over the memory of the Second World War, then this is one of the issues that lies at the heart of it. Europe and America learned very different lessons from the war. In the 1930s Europe was exposed to all the dangers of flag-waving. In the violent years that followed it experienced firsthand what happens when fanatical nationalism is allowed to get out of control. As a consequence, flags today are symbols that must be treated with great care. In post-war, post-colonial Europe, anyone who shows excessive passion towards their national flag is generally treated with suspicion. The idea of a monument glorifying the planting of a national flag on foreign soil would be absolutely unthinkable.

In the USA, by contrast, flags are everywhere: outside courtrooms, outside schools and government buildings, in public parks, outside people’s homes, on their cars, adorning their clothes. The national anthem, which is nothing less than a hymn to the flag, is sung before every NFL football game; and the pledge of allegiance to the flag is recited by every child from the moment they are old enough to attend school. This has been the case since long before the Second World War; but the war cemented the holy bond between Americans and their flag.

What Europeans fail to understand is that, to most Americans, the flag means much more than mere nationhood. It is a symbol of virtues they believe to be universal: hope, freedom, justice and democracy. Between 1941 and 1945, Americans watched the progress of their flag across Europe and the Pacific, saw liberation spreading in its wake, and knew that they were doing something remarkable. After the war they were magnanimous to those they had defeated, nursing their economies back to health, and quickly handing them back their independence. This is the final meaning of the Iwo Jima memorial: when an American soldier plants a flag on foreign soil it is not an act of domination, but of liberation.

Americans understand this instinctively. That is why, since 1945, America has paraded its flag so proudly in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia and Afghanistan. It is why, during the liberation of Baghdad in 2003, a modern marine climbed the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square and wrapped a US flag around his face. Americans believe passionately in the values they promote, which are no different from the values for which they fought the Second World War.

Unfortunately, other parts of the world see things rather differently. As we shall see next, however glorious an American flag seems when flown in the USA, it begins to look very different when planted on foreign soil.

4
USA and the Philippines: Douglas MacArthur Landing Memorial, Leyte

Just as the Soviets had monuments erected in their honour in other countries after the war, so too did the Americans. There are several in western Europe, most famously in Normandy near the beaches where the Allies landed on D-Day. There are also several in the Pacific, in places like Guadalcanal and Papua New Guinea, which saw some of the most vicious fighting of the war.

Unlike the Soviets, however, the Americans did not impose their own visions of glory upon the nations that they liberated. They did not seize positions on hill tops and in town squares, so that their monuments would dominate the urban landscape. On the whole, they confined their memorials to the cemeteries where US servicemen lay buried. As a consequence, American monuments have never aroused the same animosity that monuments to the Soviets have: what nation could possibly object to their liberators paying quiet tribute to their dead?

Every now and then, however, a different kind of monument to American heroism is raised on foreign soil, and things suddenly become much more controversial.

One such monument can be found in the municipality of Palo, on the coast of Leyte in the Philippines. It consists of seven statues, standing in a pool of water near the shore. They are larger-than-life representations of the American officers and aides who led the liberation of the country from the Japanese in 1944. Among them is the Filipino president of the time, Sergio Osmeña – but he is not the main figure. Standing front and centre, taller than all the others, is the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces for the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur. He stands upright, chest out, shoulders back, as he strides purposefully towards the shore. His eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, but it is clear that his gaze is fixed on the land he is liberating.

The Douglas MacArthur Landing Memorial is based on a photograph that was taken on this very coastline in 1944 when its liberators first waded ashore. Like most monuments devoted to American soldiers, it represents a variety of heroic virtues: perseverance, bravery, goodness, redemption, victory. Unlike most other monuments, however, it locates those virtues not in a generic hero or American everyman, but in a real-life historical figure. And not just any figure: Douglas MacArthur was one of the most controversial generals of the war.

Had the Americans themselves erected this memorial, it would have raised a few eyebrows. But the fact that it was commissioned and paid for by the Filipino government is even more interesting. No other monument says more than this one about the fallibility of American heroes, or how they are viewed by the nations they liberated.

* * *

‘I have returned’: Gaetano Faillace’s famous photograph of MacArthur striding ashore at Leyte in 1944

Douglas MacArthur was a towering figure in the history of both the Philippines and the US Army. His father was military governor of the islands during their first days as a US colony, and MacArthur himself served there several times, first as a junior officer and later as commander. In the mid-1930s he was appointed field marshal of the Philippine Army – the first and only American ever to have held this rank. But what would make him truly famous, and indeed infamous, was the role that he played here and in other parts of Asia during and after the Second World War.

MacArthur’s war began on the morning of 8 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines just a few hours after they had struck Pearl Harbor. MacArthur, who had only recently been put in charge of all US Army forces in the Far East, was taken completely by surprise. Most of his planes were destroyed on the ground before they even had a chance to take off. Soon his coastal defences on Luzon were also overwhelmed, and his troops were forced to fall back in disarray.

They retreated to the Bataan peninsula, a mountainous stretch of jungle just across the bay from Manila, where they hoped to hold out until help arrived from the US Navy. But that help never came. For three and a half months MacArthur’s men fought a series of desperate skirmishes against the Japanese with barely enough food and supplies to sustain them. Eventually they could hold out no longer. At the beginning of April 1942, around 80,000 starving men gave themselves up to the Japanese. Over the next two weeks at least 5,000 would die on an infamous ‘death march’ to internment camps in the north of the island. Thousands more were to die in squalid conditions as they waited out the rest of the war in captivity.

MacArthur himself escaped this fate at the last minute. Under the cover of night, he and a few key staff boarded a handful of patrol torpedo boats on the island of Corregidor and fled south to Mindanao. From here they caught one of the last flights out of the Philippines to safety in Australia.

Almost as soon as he arrived on Australian soil, MacArthur announced his determination to redeem himself. ‘I shall return,’ he told reporters on the station platform while he was changing trains at Terowie in South Australia. Over the next two and a half years he devoted himself to fulfilling this promise. Building up a force of eighteen American divisions, he fought desperate battles in Papua New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. Gradually he clawed his way north towards the Philippines.

His return was just as dramatic as his escape. On 20 October 1944, backed up by the power of the US Seventh Fleet, MacArthur began landing 200,000 men on the island of Leyte. While the battle was still raging, MacArthur himself boarded one of the landing boats and headed towards the shore. When it hit ground a few yards from the shoreline, he and his staff stepped down into the water and waded through the surf. The sound of small arms fire could be heard all around them, but MacArthur continued to walk fearlessly up onto the beach.

In the following days, a photograph of him striding through the waves would make front pages all over the world, accompanied by gushing articles which sang his praises to the skies. ‘The successful Philippines invasion is more than a great military victory, it is a personal triumph for MacArthur,’ announced one Australian newspaper. ‘With a crusader’s zeal and singleness of purpose rarely encountered, he concentrated everything into redeeming his pledge to the Filipino nation and to the haggard, battleworn Americans overrun on Bataan and Corregidor.’

MacArthur himself seemed to sense the huge historical importance of the moment. After he had waded ashore, he made his way to a radio and broadcast an extraordinary speech full of religious imagery. ‘To the people of the Philippines,’ he announced, ‘I have returned … The hour of your redemption is here … Rally to me! … The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!’

This is the story told by the memorial that stands on the beach today. It depicts an American hero: compassionate but tough, determined not to give up on a desperate cause, unafraid to get his hands dirty, or his shoes wet, in the pursuit of liberating his people. Symbolically speaking, MacArthur is America. He is shown here bestowing upon the Philippines the most precious gift that America had to offer – the gift of freedom. But he is more than America, too: he is a father returning to save his children, a shepherd returning to save his flock. Looking at the memorial today, there is more than a touch of the Messiah about the way that he and his disciples stand in their pool of water: they appear to be walking on top of the water rather than wading through it. Behind them is nothing but sea and sky: it is as if they have descended not from a landing craft but from heaven itself.

Most memorials endow a kind of mythical power to the events of the past – that’s the whole point of them. But imbuing a real historical figure with such qualities is a dangerous game. No man can possibly live up to such ideals, let alone a man as flamboyantly flawed as Douglas MacArthur.

There are other ways of telling the story which are not nearly so flattering to MacArthur. Many historians believe that his leadership, particularly at the beginning of the war, was greatly overrated. Why were his men not prepared for an attack? Why was their retreat to Bataan such a shambles? And why did he take such credit for the return to the Philippines, when it was only the victories of commanders in other branches of the military – particularly the US Navy – that made it possible?

Far from being the selfless, moral paragon of contemporary news stories, MacArthur is often accused of carelessness towards his men. At the beginning of the war, while his troops were starving on Bataan, he set up his command post on the well-stocked and well-fortified island of Corregidor. Records show that he only visited his beleaguered men on the mainland once. Embittered by his absence, they began calling him ‘Dugout Doug’, and composed disparaging songs about him, sung to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’:

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Dugout Doug, come out from hiding

Give to Franklin the glad tidings

That his troops go starving on!

The care he took of civilian lives was not always exemplary either. During the landings at Palo he ruthlessly shelled the coastline, regardless of the civilians who lived there: it was only thanks to an American spy called Charles Parsons that local residents evacuated the area before the bombardment began. Later on in the campaign, MacArthur’s forces bombarded Manila so comprehensively that by the end there was little left to liberate: around 100,000 Filipinos are thought to have been killed, and the historic heart of the city was reduced to rubble. When viewed from this perspective, MacArthur’s record is not nearly as admirable as it at first appears.

If MacArthur was an exceptional military leader, he was also a highly narcissistic one. It was not mere chance that made the photograph of MacArthur wading ashore so famous: he himself gave it a helping hand. The picture was taken by his personal photographer, Gaetano Faillace, and promoted by his personal team of public relations officers. This team was notorious for stretching the truth in order to make the general look good. They often pretended that MacArthur was at the front with his men when he was actually hundreds of miles away in the comfort of Australia. They gave him credit for other people’s successes, much to the chagrin of the US Navy, the Marine Corps, and even his own subordinates. According to George Kenny, MacArthur’s air force chief, ‘unless a news release painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the universe, it should be killed.’

After his death, questions also began to arise about MacArthur’s moral character. In a groundbreaking article in the Pacific Historical Review, historian Carol Petillo revealed that the general had accepted a mysterious payment from the pre-war president of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, of half a million dollars. The payment was made in the desperate days of early 1942, when Filipino leaders like Quezon were scrambling to escape falling into the hands of the Japanese. MacArthur had already told Washington that he was not willing to rescue Quezon; but after he received the money, Quezon was indeed evacuated. Most historians would stop short of suggesting that the money was a bribe to get MacArthur to change his mind; but all agree that there is something distasteful about an American leader accepting such a huge sum of money during the darkest days of the war, when his own men, just a few miles away on the Bataan peninsula, were starving.

Once one knows all this about Douglas MacArthur, is it possible to look at the memorial in the same way? The monument was supposed to celebrate the virtues of bravery, perseverance and morality, but what if it inadvertently celebrated a different set of qualities – vanity, arrogance and corruption? And what if these qualities also ended up being identified, via MacArthur, with America?

It is unlikely that the artist who created the monument asked himself any of these questions. Filipino sculptor Anastacio Caedo was commissioned to build the memorial in the mid-1970s, when memories of the war were still strong in the Philippines and MacArthur was still universally held in high regard. MacArthur was always the central figure in the monument. By his own admission, Caedo did not know the identity of all the men he was sculpting – he was simply trying to make a three-dimensional image of Faillace’s famous photograph.

Caedo wanted to make the sculptures out of bronze, but there was not enough time or funds to get them ready for the inauguration. He therefore cast them in reinforced concrete and painted them with metallic olive-drab paint. (Today’s bronze statues are a later replacement.) The unveiling was to take place in October 1977, but first there were political hurdles to negotiate. The president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, ordered major changes to the memorial at the last moment. Caedo’s sculpture included a giant landing craft as a backdrop to the seven statues, exactly as the wartime photographs showed; but the First Lady ordered the backdrop torn down, saying that the monument ‘should honour men, not barges’. Caedo, who had spent eight months building this element of the memorial, reportedly burst into tears when it was dismantled.

It was not only Imelda Marcos who took a direct interest in the memorial. Her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, was also heavily involved both in the planning of the monument and in the celebration of it when it was unveiled. In a speech at the inauguration, he made it clear what the memorial was supposed to symbolise: ‘Let this Landing Memorial … be a tribute to the American fighting men who crossed the vast Pacific in fulfilment of a promise to return,’ he said. Furthermore, ‘Let it be a renewal of the Filipino people’s bond of friendship with the people of the United States of America.’

Other public figures of the time expressed similar sentiments. The Filipino foreign minister, Carlos Romulo, emphasised how important the memory of MacArthur was for Filipino–American relations. ‘We owe him a debt of gratitude that we cannot forget,’ he said in an interview in 1981. ‘His name is revered and idolised in the Philippines.’

There was a certain amount of national self-interest in making such statements. During the 1970s, the Philippines was in thrall to American investment, American financial and military aid, and American credit. The country was moreover home to dozens of American military bases, from which US troops dominated the western Pacific and the South China Sea. In such an atmosphere, it certainly made sense to pay tribute to ‘American fighting men’ like MacArthur. Corrupt Filipino officials also had darker reasons to sing America’s praises. Many of them, starting with President Marcos himself, were making a fortune out of bribes from American businesses, or from skimming development aid as it entered the country. The occasional grand gesture towards the USA was probably considered a sound investment.

However, alongside such cynical motivations, there was also a great deal of sincerity. Corrupt or not, Marcos and his administration did not impose the memorial upon his nation: it was always backed by popular sentiment. And probably personal sentiment too: it is impossible to escape the suspicion that government leaders had their own private reasons for wanting to see MacArthur honoured in this way. President Marcos had served under the general during the war, and claimed to have been personally decorated by him (although such claims later turned out to be more than a little exaggerated). Marcos was every bit as narcissistic as MacArthur, and repeatedly tried to wrap himself in the general’s reflected glory. His wife, Imelda, also had a personal interest in the memorial: she had grown up in Leyte, very close to where the landings took place, and had witnessed the liberation first hand. Carlos Romulo, meanwhile, was even closer to MacArthur; so close, in fact, that he himself appears in the monument (he is the helmeted figure standing at the back of the group).

In commissioning this memorial, interfering in its design, and celebrating it so wholeheartedly, those at the centre of government were not only honouring an important moment in Filipino history; nor were they merely acknowledging an important military, political and economic alliance. They were also dramatising one of the most important moments in their own lives.

* * *

Times change. When I first visited the Philippines in 1990, a fresh wind had already begun to blow. Marcos had gone, ousted by a popular uprising in 1986; his government had been revealed as one of the most fantastically corrupt and violent regimes of the post-war era; and a new, democratic government under Cory Aquino had begun investigating his crimes. The whole country was struggling to come to terms with its immediate past.

At the same time, resentment of American power was running high, particularly regarding the presence of American military bases on the islands. US soldiers were no longer regarded as heroes, but as a humiliating imposition upon a sovereign nation. The Filipino press often carried stories about the exploitation of women around the huge air force and naval bases at Angeles City and Subic Bay. The national conversation was all about taking back control from a giant, neo-colonial power.

Anti-Americanism also found its way into academic circles. Several historians, among them the renowned Renato Constantino, had begun to challenge the popular view of the liberation at the end of the Second World War. They claimed that the Philippines had not needed rescuing by outsiders, and that the Filipino resistance had been on the verge of defeating the Japanese on their own. MacArthur was no longer the unequivocal hero he had once been: in some quarters he was regarded as a symbol of continued American imperialism, stepping ashore in Leyte not to liberate the Philippines, but to reclaim it.

Over the following years, successive governments decided to try to commemorate a much more Filipino-focused view of history. New monuments were built, most notably a Filipino Heroes Memorial (inaugurated in 1992) and a monument to the victims of the liberation of Manila (in 1995). In more recent years memorials have even been built to the Hukbalahap – a wartime guerrilla movement that fought against not only the Japanese but also the return of the Americans.

If the Philippines were to follow the same pattern as other countries, the next step would be clear: there would be calls on politicians to shake off their colonial history and tear down the memorial to MacArthur. In one or two other Asian countries something similar has already happened. In South Korea, for example, where MacArthur was long revered as the commander who turned the tide of the Korean War, his statue in Incheon has been the focus of repeated demonstrations against American influence in the country. In 2005, riots broke out around the statue, with protesters calling for it to be torn down.

So far, however, the Filipino people have stopped short of such moves, at least as far as the MacArthur Landing Memorial is concerned. The authorities still treat this monument with great care and respect. When one of the seven statues (that of Carlos Romulo) was toppled by a typhoon in 2013, it was immediately repaired by the government and restored to its position. War veterans and their families continue to visit the memorial every year on 20 October, accompanied by dignitaries from Manila, Washington, Canberra and Tokyo. Down on the beach there are regular re-enactments of the battle, and the nearby city of Tacloban holds an annual Liberation Day parade.

Despite all his faults, and the long-running arguments between historians, MacArthur is still a hero in the Philippines – if only for the single moment when he stepped upon the shore of Leyte. Today the statues in Palo representing him and his aides are a little tarnished by weather and corrosion. They have been soiled by the birds that occasionally land on them. But they stand nevertheless, their eyes focused on the Philippine shore, their faces still a picture of grim determination.

5
UK: Bomber Command Memorial, London

The USSR and the USA were not the only major victors of the Second World War: Britain also belonged to this elite club of heroes. Of the so-called ‘Big Three’, Britain was the only one to have been engaged in the war right from the very start. It therefore holds a special place in Allied history.

Britain’s capital, London, was for many years the epicentre of the Allied war effort. As a consequence, it has become home to dozens of different war memorials devoted to all manner of people and nationalities. There are monuments to the civilians who died in the Blitz, to the city’s firefighters, its railway workers and its air raid wardens. There are large installations dedicated to the Canadian soldiers who fought for Britain, to the Australians, to the New Zealanders and to the soldiers from India and the rest of the British Empire. Every branch of the military seems to have its own monument here, from fighter pilots and tank crews to Gurkhas and Chindits. There are statues of generals, admirals and air marshals. There is even a memorial to the animals that served during the war.

However, one monument in London stands out among all the others. The RAF Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park is one of London’s newest: it was only inaugurated in 2012, long after almost all the others were built. It is also by far the largest Second World War memorial in the city: over 8 metres (26 feet) high and 80 metres (262 feet) long, it is probably twice as big as its nearest rival. But what really makes the memorial unique is its design. Unlike London’s other war monuments, which all stand out in the open, this one is semi-enclosed. It conceals its message inside an elaborate structure of Doric columns and classical balustrades: it looks more like a Greek temple than a war memorial. Inside, taking the place of Mars or Apollo, are the statues of seven airmen, standing in a group as though they have just returned from a mission. It is quite clear from their size, their stance, and the way that each of them gazes confidently into the distance that these men are supposed to be heroes. As you enter the temple-like structure, you are forced to look up at them as if they were objects of worship. Above their heads, the roof is open, so that nothing stands between them and heaven. If ever there were a temple to British heroism, this surely is it.

The Bomber Command Memorial is one of the most important monuments in London, but it is also one of the most problematic. Despite the heroic pose of the statues within, it is not at all clear why these men should be considered heroes. Unlike so many other statues devoted to the war, they are not raising a flag, or wielding a sword, or stepping onto a beach to liberate a nation. In fact, they are not in any kind of dynamic pose at all: they are just standing there. On the wall, carved deep into the stone, is an inscription telling us that 55,573 similar men were killed during the war. But this does not explain their heroic stance either: dying in large numbers like this implies some kind of victimhood, not heroism. On the opposite wall is a quote from Winston Churchill, claiming that ‘the bombers alone provide the means of victory’. But how? And why? What exactly did these men do to win our adulation?

To understand what this memorial is commemorating, you need to know something about the bomber war, and the leading role that Britain took in this type of combat during the Second World War. But to understand why it looks as it does, why it is so much bigger than every other British war memorial, and what it is really trying to say, you need to understand the political atmosphere in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the forces that led to the building of the monument in the first place.

Britain’s bomber war is one of the most controversial episodes in the country’s recent history. It began with the best of intentions. The British government made a solemn promise to spare civilians wherever possible, and only sent its bombers to strike specific military installations. But bombing specific targets in those days meant getting in close and bombing in broad daylight. In such circumstances the slow bomber planes were easy targets for flak guns and fighter planes: casualties among British aircrews were catastrophic.

So the Royal Air Force changed tactics. It began bombing at night instead, and from higher altitudes. This kept British planes and crews safer, but it also made their bombing far less accurate. According to a government report in 1942, only one in three British bombs landed within five miles of its target.

Far from being Churchill’s ‘means of victory’, therefore, bombing was turning out to be a costly failure. The RAF seemed to be faced with two alternatives, both of them equally hopeless. They could attack in daylight and be shot down, or they could attack by night and miss their targets.

It was at this point that a new commander-in-chief took charge at Bomber Command – a brusque, uncompromising leader named Arthur Harris. It was Harris who championed the idea of a different kind of bombing: to forget about picking out individual military targets, and simply bomb entire cities instead. There was a certain brutal logic to this. If bombing were to work then it would have to be acknowledged as the blunt instrument that it was. By bombing large areas, the RAF could destroy not only the factories and installations that were supplying Germany with arms, but also the homes of the workers who staffed those factories. Killing the workers themselves was part of the plan: in a total war, factory workers were considered a target just as legitimate as the soldiers they supplied.

But Harris went further. By devastating entire cities, he believed that he could break not only the German economy, but also the will of the German people to continue fighting at all. According to this reasoning, shops, restaurants, schools and hospitals were legitimate targets. The purpose was to drive Germany to despair. Thus, ordinary civilians were no longer collateral damage – they had themselves become targets.

Harris knew that he was crossing a moral line, but believed that the ends justified the means: if he could bring an early end to the war, he reasoned, then his brutal policy might end up saving more lives than it took. He was quite open about this, and wanted to enlist the support of the British people. The only reason he did not explain his strategy publicly was that the government prevented him from doing so. Churchill and his cabinet wholeheartedly endorsed the strategy; but they wanted to keep up the pretence that Bomber Command’s targets were always strictly military.

Unfortunately German morale never collapsed as Harris hoped it would. The war dragged on, and city after city in Germany was devastated. According to military historian Richard Overy, some 600,000 civilians were killed beneath Allied bombs, not only in Germany, but also in those countries that the Allies were liberating. It was a horrific death toll, outnumbering the British victims of German bombs by almost ten to one. At the time, however, the British public did not seem to care too much. Every successful bombing was reported in the newspapers with triumphant glee. Bomber crews went on publicity tours of British factories, and the stories they told the workers were invariably greeted with cheers. The loss of German civilian life was deemed a price worth paying.

Towards the end of the war, however, the atmosphere suddenly changed. The turning point was the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. During a press conference after the raid, a senior officer let slip that it had been conducted partly to destroy ‘what is left of German morale’. In the following days, stories began to appear claiming that the British were conducting ‘terror bombing’. Questions were asked in the House of Commons. After the American press got hold of the story, the Royal Air Force was put under considerable international pressure to explain its actions.

It was not long before the British establishment turned its back on the men of Bomber Command. Churchill drafted a memo to his chiefs of staff berating them for indulging in ‘acts of terror and wanton destruction’ (although he toned down his rhetoric in the final version of the memo). The hypocrisy of this memo is really quite something. Churchill had always known what strategy Harris was following, but had never before expressed much concern about it. After the Allied victory in May 1945, Churchill praised every branch of the armed forces in his victory speech – but made almost no mention of Britain’s bombers. In his bestselling memoirs, published after the war, Churchill omitted the bombing of Dresden. It was as if he hoped that the episode could be erased from public memory simply by not talking about it.

Naturally, the men who flew the bombers were quite disoriented by this sudden change of heart. As the official historian of the bomber war, Noble Frankland, put it, ‘Most people were very pleased with Bomber Command during the war and until it was virtually won; then they turned around and said it wasn’t a very nice way to wage war.’

The indignation this caused over the following years cannot be overestimated. I have known and interviewed dozens of British bomber crew, and most of them have spoken bitterly about the way they were shunned by the establishment after 1945. Many were upset that they were never granted their own specific medal, but instead had to make do with a more generic campaign medal that was granted to everyone in the air force. They saw this as yet another way in which their contribution to the war was being discreetly brushed under the carpet. Worse still was the way that they were treated by the general public. During the war, a bomber crewman who walked into a pub in uniform would rarely have to buy his own drinks; but after 1945 he would have to think twice before admitting to what he’d done during the war. In the 1960s especially, when a new generation was questioning the actions of its parents, students sometimes mocked the claims of bomber veterans that they were ‘only following orders’. Right-wing historians like David Irving also drew deliberate, if dubious, parallels between Nazi atrocities and the actions of the RAF. The men of Bomber Command, once heroes, were suddenly being treated as villains.

Eventually this backlash against veterans of the air war fizzled out, and a more nuanced view began to take hold. In the late 1970s, historians like Martin Middlebrook and Max Hastings led the way in rehabilitating the men of Bomber Command in the minds of the public. Since then there have been dozens and dozens of popular histories by authors like Robin Neillands, Mel Rolfe and Kevin Wilson. In the years when I used to work in military publishing I collaborated with many of these authors, and indeed commissioned some of their books myself.

In the 1990s and 2000s a succession of British TV dramas and documentaries about the bomber war brought this nuanced view of history into the mainstream. Viewers of the BBC drama Bomber Harris, or the Channel 4 documentary Reaping the Whirlwind, were invited to put themselves in the shoes of the airmen before making moral judgements. Gradually the British public was learning to come to terms with an uncomfortable history.

Sensing that the public was ready to support them, the Bomber Command Association began in 2009 to campaign for a memorial. They were granted their wish three years later, in the summer of 2012, when the Bomber Command Memorial was finally inaugurated.

Had this been all there was to the story, the Bomber Command Memorial would not have been nearly as interesting, or as problematic, as it is today. It might have ended up resembling some of the memorials to the bomber war in other parts of Britain and Germany. For example, it could have been a monument to reconciliation, like Coventry Cathedral’s ‘Cross of Nails’ (see Chapter 24). It might have been an anti-war sculpture, like the Dammtordamm monument in central Hamburg. At the very least, it might have made a nod to the dark moral choices that Britain was forced to make because of the war. But then a new wave of popular sentiment swept over the issue, making any such nuance almost impossible.

The problems began when the newspapers started to become involved. The Bomber Command Memorial was to be built with private funding, so three daily newspapers – the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express – ran campaigns to raise money. Since these are all newspapers of the political right, the memorial was largely supported by right-wing donors, particularly Lord Ashcroft, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, who contributed £1 million. The political left, by contrast, were scarcely invited to have a say – and nor, to their shame, did they particularly seem to want one. Thus, what should have been a project that brought people together from across the political spectrum ended up being a highly partisan cause célèbre.

In order to drum up support for the memorial, the three newspapers, especially the Daily Mail, began to publish highly emotive stories about how the men of Bomber Command had been snubbed. Articles began to appear calling them ‘Forgotten Heroes’, or ‘the black sheep of the British popular memory of the Second World War’ – despite the fact that they were neither forgotten, nor any longer regarded as ‘black sheep’. Online rumours began to spread suggesting that the local council was blocking the construction of a memorial because its planners were ashamed of Britain’s bomber crews, or that Germany was putting pressure on the British government to veto the project – stories that had little foundation in truth.

When historians insisted that there should be at least some mention of the controversial aspects of bombing, they were derided as milksops with no sense of national pride. Columnists claimed that the men of Bomber Command were under attack once again, this time by the forces of political correctness. (In the end, the builders of the memorial did agree to add an inscription mentioning ‘those of all nations who lost their lives in the bombing of 1939–1945’. But it was in an awkward position, high up near the roof, and obscured from view by the statue. It was quite obviously an afterthought.)

I watched this happening with a certain amusement, but also with growing incredulity, because I knew from years of research that the vast majority of what was being said was complete nonsense. I was particularly struck by the way that the veterans of Bomber Command were portrayed. The British press always labelled them ‘heroes’, but in fact were depicting them as victims. None of the men I had interviewed over the years felt nearly as sorry for themselves as the newspapers seemed to feel for them. On the whole they had been sensible men, who had long since come to terms with the way they had fought the war and were generally satisfied with the way that British society had belatedly come to accept them. So where was all this indignation coming from?

The truth is that the Bomber Command Memorial, like all the monuments in this book, says at least as much about the society that erected it as it does about the people it supposedly commemorates. There is nothing modern or contemporary about it, like so many of the other recent memorials that stand nearby: this is a monument to nostalgia. Its classical columns and balustrades evoke a bygone era when Britain was still a great colonial power. The architect, Liam O’Connor, made much of the fact that the style of the memorial echoed the façades of the houses opposite – houses that were built at the height of Britain’s imperial splendour. Its size and prominence are the result of a deliberate attempt to create something physically impressive, just as Britain once used to do in the days of Admiral Nelson and Queen Victoria.

The statues, too, are an exercise in nostalgia. Their stance and attitude evoke the stoic heroes of British war films of the 1950s – films like Reach for the Sky and The Dam Busters. These are heroes who don’t have to be seen doing anything dramatic: the drama is all beneath their strong, silent surface. We do not make heroes like this any more.

British people still speak of the Second World War as their ‘finest hour’, but deep down they also understand that it was the end of something. The Second World War cost Britain its empire, its prestige, and its pre-eminent place in the world economy. After 1945, it was no longer the workshop of the world; and it was never again able to dictate world events as it had done during the previous two centuries. Britain was left virtually bankrupt by the war, and was forced for years to rely on financial aid from the USA. No wonder the British feel indignant, snubbed, cheated by history. No wonder they can’t quite make up their minds whether they are heroes or victims.

This has been one of the major themes of post-war life in Britain, and one that the nation still has not come to terms with. During the war itself, officials were already joking that the USA, the USSR and Great Britain were not really the Big Three, but the Big Two and a Half. In the 1960s, the former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role’. The nation regained some of its pride in the 1980s and 1990s, during the age of Thatcherism and ‘Cool Britannia’, but at the start of the twenty-first century it once again feels itself in the shadow of others: the USA, China, the European Union.

This is the true meaning of the Bomber Command Memorial, with its heroes staring out between Doric columns like prisoners in a cage. They are a group of heroes who appear to have nothing heroic to do. They have finished their mission, but have been cheated of their glory, and now they merely stand there, gazing across London’s Green Park, waiting stoically to see what new disappointments might be looming on the horizon.

6
Italy: Shrine to the Fallen, Bologna

The themes on display at London’s Bomber Command Memorial are part of a much greater pattern that is evident not only in the UK but all over the world. In the twenty-first century, every nation likes to believe itself a nation of heroes; but deep down, most nations are beginning to think of themselves as victims.

This process has been decades in the making. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, heroism was still in great demand. But in the years since then, many nations have come to realise that heroism comes with responsibilities. For example, the USA, the one undisputed winner of the war, has found itself obliged to act as the world’s policeman ever since. Britain too felt obliged to keep the world’s peace after 1945, despite the fact that it could no longer afford to do so.

There are other dangers, too. Heroes always run the risk of being exposed as the flawed human beings they really are; and, once exposed, they can quickly fall from grace – much as the old Soviet heroes have recently fallen from grace in eastern Europe. In an effort to stave off this trend, some nations have resorted to defending their Second World War heroes with a manic vigour. One need only look at the way that the USA mythologises its ‘greatest generation’, or that Britain continuously mythologises the figure of Winston Churchill, to see how much work it takes to maintain hero status.

Other nations, however, have given up portraying themselves as heroes altogether. Instead they have increasingly begun to choose another motif for their memorials, equally powerful, and equally pure – that of martyrdom. This is a much easier identity to maintain. It allows a nation to keep the moral high ground without having to shoulder any of the work or responsibility for maintaining peace; and it is an easy way to deflect criticism. In the next part of the book I will discuss the growth of victimhood as a national motif, which comes with its own drawbacks and dangers.

First, however, I want to explore one final monument to heroism, which shows a very different side of what it is to be a hero.

The Shrine to the Fallen in Bologna, Italy, is a much more intimate memorial than any I have described so far. Based on the simplest of ideas, it consists of some 2,000 portraits and names of local resistance fighters attached to the wall of the municipal building in Piazza del Nettuno, right in the centre of the city. This was the site where captured partisans were publicly executed during the war. Since 1945 it has become a commemorative site not only for those who died here, but also for those who died fighting the Nazis and Italian Fascists all over the region.

Unlike any of the other monuments in this book, this one was not erected by the state, or by a museum, or by any other kind of remembrance organisation. It was not planned in advance, but born in a spontaneous burst of emotion. It was put together by local people to commemorate the lives and deaths of those they had known and loved. It highlights something about the war that does not come across in most larger, state-sponsored memorials: the Second World War was not only a titanic conflict between giant armies on the battlefield, it was also an intensely local war fought in the hills and the forests, and on the streets of towns far behind the front lines. The war had a different flavour in Italy from that of Poland or France; and it had a different flavour in Bologna from that of Naples or Milan. The Shrine to the Fallen was not constructed to express national virtues or ambitions; it was simply an expression of local pride, and local loss. It is reminiscent of something that we all do privately in our living rooms at home – display the portraits of those we most love. This is who we are, it says. These people are family.

The war in Italy was much more complicated than it was in other parts of Europe. Italy had begun the war as an ally of Germany, but ended up being occupied by German forces when it tried to change sides in 1943. After the Allies invaded the south, the Germans set up a puppet government under Benito Mussolini in the north, and the country was effectively split in two. In the midst of this upheaval, a resistance movement grew up. All kinds of groups joined the partisans, but the driving force behind it was the Italian Communist Party, which sought not only to liberate the nation from the Germans, but also to overthrow the Fascists who had ruled Italy since the 1920s, and to institute widespread social change in the process.

As a major centre of the Resistance, Bologna suffered more than most places in Italy. In the last year of the war, the region was awash with intrigue and violence. In nearby Marzabotto, an entire village was massacred by the Waffen-SS in reprisal for local resistance activity – at least 770 men, women and children were shot in cold blood, or burned to death in their houses. Within Bologna city centre there were more than forty different public shootings, involving around 140 men and women. Piazza del Nettuno was a favourite spot for both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists to carry out these executions. Between July 1944 and the end of the war at least eighteen people were shot here. Their bodies were left on display as a warning to the local population; and to drive the point home, a sarcastic notice was placed on the wall proclaiming it a ‘place of refreshment for partisans’.

However, if such violence was supposed to deter people from joining the Resistance, it did not work. By the end of the war the Bolognese people had had enough. On 19 April they rose up in insurrection, and within two days had taken control of the city. According to official figures, by this time more than 14,000 local people were actively fighting for the partisans, of which more than 2,200 were women. Bologna was in the vanguard of a nationwide movement: a few days later, on 25 April, insurrection spread to all parts of northern Italy.

As the Germans and their Fascist puppets fled the city, the people of Bologna were at last able to mourn their losses publicly. The families of those who had been executed returned to Piazza del Nettuno and set up a shrine to their loved ones. Someone pushed an old green table against the wall, upon which people could place little mementos, flowers and framed photographs of those who had died. An Italian flag was hung on the wall, and more photographs were pinned to it.

In the coming days, this shrine grew and grew. Within a couple of months there were hundreds of photographs spreading for 20 metres along the wall. It quickly became not only a place of mourning for those who had been killed on this spot, but also a place of respect for all those who had died in the name of freedom. There were photographs and tributes to all kinds of people: teenage boys executed for resistance activities, women in their sixties who had died heroically in combat, men in their prime who had died in training accidents or had been tortured to death by the authorities. The full range of the partisan experience was represented here.

It was not long before the new city authorities decided that the shrine should become a permanent feature affixed to the medieval wall of the Palazzo d’Accursio. In 1955 the paper photographs were taken down and replaced with weatherproof tiles, each one displaying the name or portrait of a single man or woman. Today there are more than two thousand tiles on that wall, along with sixteen larger tiles reproducing photos of the time. It is an enduring reminder of the suffering and bravery of the people of Bologna.

As the saying goes, everything is political. The Shrine to the Fallen may have begun as a simple symbol of mourning; but there was always more to it than that. It was inevitable that it would include some political overtones; after all, it had been built to commemorate those who had died for their beliefs. Political themes were therefore present in the shrine from the beginning, and would continue to characterise it over the following decades.

The liberation of Bologna in April 1945 was a chaotic and violent event. According to Edward Reep, an American war artist who witnessed the liberation of the city, one of the first acts to take place in Piazza del Nettuno in April 1945 was not one of mourning at all, but one of vengeance. Before the shrine was first set up, a Fascist collaborator was shot here: his fresh blood was still visible on the wall. In other words, the political violence that had characterised the war years was not quite over; it was just that the boot was now on the other foot. In the long aftermath of the war, similar violence would continue to rear its head from time to time all over Italy.

The original shrine in 1945

According to Reep, political symbols were incorporated into the shrine even while it was first taking shape:

Within minutes, an Italian flag was hung on the wall, above and to the left of the blood stain … The House of Savoy emblem had been ripped away from the white central panel of the flag; pinned in its place was a stiff black ribbon of mourning. This became a dual gesture: it signified the end of the monarchy and Fascism, and it became a memorial to those who had given their lives in the long struggle for liberation.

It was upon this flag that mourners first pinned their photographs.[fn1]

In the following years, the Shrine became one of many monuments in Bologna dedicated to the partisans. In 1946, a bronze statue of Mussolini on horseback was melted down to create two new statues of Italian Resistance fighters: they can be seen today at Porta Lame, north-west of the city centre. In 1959, an Ossuary to the Fallen Partisans was built in Certosa Cemetery by architect Piero Bottoni, and in the 1970s two more monuments were built: one in Villa Spada, and another at Sabbiuno, just south of the city. In addition, several streets and piazzas were renamed after the war. For example, the piazza named after King Umberto I became ‘Piazza of the Martyrs of 1943–1945’.

All this was part of a deliberate attempt not only to demonstrate the city’s moral and social rebirth after the war, but also to redefine its very identity. Monarchist and Fascist symbols were torn down, and symbols of the Resistance were put up in their place. If Bologna was to be a city of heroes, they were not to be the old, elitist heroes. From now on it would be workers and students who were celebrated – ordinary people, with faces like those on display in Piazza del Nettuno.

Under the gaze of all those dead heroes, the people of Bologna were more or less obliged to follow the future laid out for them by the memory of their wartime struggles. In the first post-war municipal elections, held in March 1946, they elected a member of the Resistance as their mayor. Giuseppe Dozza would lead the city council for the next twenty years; and his party, the Italian Communist Party, would remain the major force in Bolognese politics for most of the rest of the century.

In the 1970s and 1980s the city once again came under attack. During the anni di piombo – the ‘years of lead’ – the whole of Italy became embroiled in political violence. Many other cities suffered terrorist attacks at the hands of the Communist ‘Red Brigades’; but Bologna came under assault from neo-Fascists. In 1980, a bomb was set off at the main railway station, killing eighty-five people and injuring some two hundred more. Two smaller-scale attacks also happened in 1974 and 1984, killing a dozen or so people each time. The reason was clear: Bologna had been targeted because it was a left-wing city.

To commemorate these attacks, a new plaque was put up in Piazza del Nettuno close to the Shrine, listing the names of the dead. Unwittingly, however, the new plaque marked a subtle shift in the city’s memorial landscape. The original Shrine to the Fallen had never given the impression of a people that felt sorry for themselves, despite the terrible atrocities they had suffered during the war. The wording above it states clearly, in large metal letters, that the wartime partisans were heroes who had died in a just cause: ‘for liberty and justice, for honour and the independence of the fatherland’. The wording on the new plaque, however, carried no such message. Here, the dead were simply ‘victims of Fascist terrorism’. They had not died in a cause. There was no semblance of heroism. When the two memorials are taken together, the lines between heroism and victimhood no longer seem so clear-cut. The senseless violence of the 1980s is reflected back in time to the equally senseless violence of the war years, and even the partisans begin to look less like heroes and more like martyrs.

In recent years, there have been even greater shifts in the city’s identity. The old certainties of Bolognese political life have long since broken down: Communism died here, just as it did all over Europe, with the end of the Cold War. Since the turn of the century there has been little continuity between the city’s wartime past and its present: largely speaking, the Communists have given way to the more moderate Social Democrats. The tides of globalisation are also visible, not only in the university, which has always welcomed students from all over Italy and the world, but also in the general population. More than 10 per cent of the people living in Bologna today come from other countries, and that percentage is growing all the time.

In such a world, the 2,000 portraits on Piazza del Nettuno no longer have the power that they once did. They are obviously from a bygone era. Their faces look stiff, formal – nothing like the smiling selfies that today’s generations routinely post on social media. Why should these old portraits be relevant any more? Why should today’s city be held prisoner to their history, and their ideas?

And yet they still dominate the wall of this medieval piazza. Local politicians making their way to and from the town hall must walk past them every day. Students who gather on the steps of the public library sit in their shadow. Like the photographs of long-dead aunts and uncles in countless homes across Bologna, they gaze down on the inhabitants of this left-wing city, silently reminding them of who they are, and where they have come from.

Coda: The End of Heroism

Heroes are like rainbows: they can only really be appreciated from a distance. As soon as we get too close, the very qualities that make them shine tend to disappear.

None of the monuments I have described so far reflect the nuances of historical reality. The greatness of the Russian Motherland was always built on shaky foundations. America’s devotion to its flag, while glorious to Americans themselves, always looked a little dubious to everyone else. Britain needed its famous stiff upper lip not only to win the war but also to weather the disappointments that would follow. And resistance movements – not only in Bologna, but all over Europe and Asia – usually did far more dying than they ever did resisting. But none of this really matters, because these monuments were never meant to express historical reality. They are representations of our mythological idea of what it means to be a hero, that’s all. They are as much expressions of identity as they are of history.

In some ways our monuments to our Second World War heroes seem quite timeless. The values they express – strength, stoicism, brotherhood, virtue – are no different from the values that all societies have held dear since ancient times. But in other ways they seem hopelessly dated: indeed, some of them, like the Bomber Command Memorial in London, already looked old-fashioned from the moment they were first unveiled. It is no coincidence that all the monuments I have mentioned in this section are conventional statues, or photographs, or statues based on photographs. This is the way that heroes are generally commemorated throughout the world. Compared to some of the monuments I will describe later, they are rather unadventurous.

Heroes represent our ideals. They must be brave but gentle, steadfast but flexible, strong but tolerant; they must always be virtuous, always be flawless, always be ready to spring into action; and as our communal champions they must represent all of us, all the time. No individual can possibly live up to such expectations. Neither can any group.

And yet some nations have been bequeathed these responsibilities by history. As the undisputed victor of the Second World War, America has been called upon to act the hero ever since. To a lesser degree, the UK and France have also felt obliged to take a leading role in international affairs, particularly when it comes to their former colonies. Even Russia sometimes feels obliged to live up to its status as a great power. The efforts of these nations are not always appreciated, and unsurprisingly so: no modern-day international policeman can ever live up to the Second World War ideal.

Times change. Values, even timeless values, go in and out of fashion: who today celebrates qualities like stubbornness, inflexibility, or the willingness to endure silently? Inevitably some of the heroes we used to revere seem faintly tragic, or even slightly ridiculous, to modern sensibilities. Communities also change. Our heroes are supposed to represent who we think we are, or at least who we would like to imagine ourselves to be, but when we begin to adopt new political outlooks, or when our communities absorb people of different classes, religions or ethnicities, it becomes hard to identify with the old heroes any longer.

All this highlights a strange paradox: our heroes, who in our minds seem so strong and indestructible, are actually the most vulnerable figures in the historical pantheon. It does not take much to knock them from their pedestals.

There are other, more robust motifs. As I have already hinted, many groups are now much more likely to portray themselves as martyrs than as heroes. In most cases, the groups in question have little choice in the matter: we are all prisoners of our history, and these are the roles that the tragic events of the past have bequeathed them. Nevertheless, as will become clear, martyrdom turns out to be a much stronger identity than heroism ever was. Heroes come and go. But a martyr is for ever.

Part II