Peter Hitchens: Was WW2 pointless?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sunday, 20 April 2008 10:19.

The Daily Mail is a ghastly little rag. It makes its money by throwing tidbits to the apoplectic classes. Apoplectica - never an attractive demographic, but also never slow on the patriotic uptake - duly responds with much harrumphing and general, if meaningless, indignation.

Master valve open. Hot air released. Situation normal.

It’s a curious kind of handcart for the ride to hell. But since 2001 the Mail has been able to boast among its columnists the doyen of thinking cart-pullers, Peter Hitchens. It even gave him his own

~~blog~~

soapbox.

Hitchens, of course, is famously conflicted with his brother Christopher, the infinitely more successful and recently-Jewish one-time Bilderberger and liberal galáctico. One can only imagine with what disdain the bibulous god-basher must view his brother’s professional domicile in right-wing populism. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that matters took a serious turn for the worse over the cornflakes this morning.

The headline won’t have helped: Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens.

Hitch explains:-

It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.

Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.

Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases.

With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor. I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours. I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can’t watch them without a catch in the throat.

This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set. So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn’t really want to know if it wasn’t exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me.

... On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry. I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.

They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War. We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938. Well, I didn’t feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don’t.

Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question. The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today’s Churchills. They were wrong. In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill’s war was a good war? What if the Men of Glory didn’t need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?

Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I’m often asked by readers here. The milder version is: “Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?” The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain’s landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: “Why did we bother?”

Don’t read on if these questions rock your universe.

If I was a betting man I wouldn’t mind a small wager that it was at this point in the proceedings when sometime yesterday the telephone rang chez Peter, and the voice of Paul Dacre sounded in his shell-like.

“Peter, this piece you mailed in ... not your usual line of country, is it?”

Perplexed silence.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Peter. All very interesting. But you know how we operate. We’re not in business to challenge the reader. This isn’t New Statesman.”

“But Paul, I ...”

“I’m sorry, Peter, we have to think about our advertisers. Remember who pays your wages. And mine.”

In any event, Hitchens didn’t go on to scorch the page with hard-won truths about the internationalism for which Alled servicemen really fought. Dots remained unconnected. The Mail’s decorum was respected. But he goes on to explain that:-

... the two books out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.

It’s odd because, like Hitchens, I was born six years after the war and I have had to make the same journey of accomodation he has. MRers will know that as well as being an accomodation with the past it is a revelation about the present. The accomodation, of course, is not with liebensraum or Tuetonic supremacism, or the militarisation of society, or the violation of human rights or any other of the trespasses of Nazism. It is with the unacknowledged trespasses of “our” side, if one can even call it that. This is an accomodation that can be made by any of the British war veterans who write to Hitchens and ask “Why did we bother?”. I find it difficult to believe that a pugnacious and intelligent inquirer like Hitchens only made it himself the other day when, Damascene-like, he chanced upon these two inconvenient books.

I presume, therefore, that he used them to front subject matter that he wants, for his own reasons, to inject into public consciousness. If so, and if he returns to the subject more expansively later, I will be able to re-assess the man more favourably.

I doubt that I will have occasion to re-assess the Daily Mail.

Anyhow, here’s some more of what Hitchens published:-

Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief.

If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident. Its outbreak halted the “Kindertransport” trains rescuing Jewish children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it.

Baker is also keen to show that Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder.

The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing.

A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: “A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane.

Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace. As the First World War began in 1914, two observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as “radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man”.

Churchill also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars. It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against.

Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did.

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan’s views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying Buchanan’s chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions.

The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world’s greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.

We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war. This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

Worse still is Buchanan’s analysis of how we went to war.

I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes. That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: “Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations.” He then even more wetly urged “Herr Hitler” to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan doesn’t think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right. But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain’s guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our “stand” as an empty bluff, and called it. The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler’s eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.

We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies. As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.

Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other’s bowels?

Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire? The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out.

He was very narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead? But he didn’t. His “plan” to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned. Can it be true that he wasn’t very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours.

Of course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself. By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries. We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain. And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.

Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense. No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved. But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

Tags: Journalism

Comments:

Posted by Captainchaos on Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:00 | #

Charles Lindbergh opposed the United States entering the war against Germany explicitly for the reason that it would be bad for our race. He was right.

Hitler wanted a free hand in the east, he should have been given it. Had Hitler not been forced to fight a two front war Germany almost certainly would have been victorious against the Soviet Union. The jews would have been finished in Europe. Europe would have had a commitment to racial health and high fertility.

I believe this to be what Hitchens and Buchanan truly believe and wish they could shout from the roof tops but can only hint at lest they be driven into financial oblivion: Lindbergh was right.

Posted by Amalek on Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:17 | #

I’d rewind further. Our big mistake was to guarantee “gallant little Belgium” in 1914.

It was touch and go on that hot Bank Holiday weekend if Britain would come in. Probably most Liberals in the country did not want to fight the Kaiser on the Tsar’s and M. Le President’s behalf. Edward VII had facilitated the entente cordiale which finally made us turn our back on the ally of 1815 and side with our ancestral enemy since Bloody Mary’s day against our closer racial kinsmen—side with infidel republicans against Christian monarchy.

That horrible little Welsh rat Lloyd George swayed the Cabinet to send the BEF, which blunted the impact of the Germans’ “sichelschnitt” just enough to bog the three great Ruropean powers down in trench warfare. For four years we bled each other white and sealed Europe’s fate. The universal darkness of American multiculti subtopia and Judeao-Bolshevism, financed on Wall Street, were granted world economic and, in time, military, leadership.

Blame the balance of power doctrine Britain had evolved for the far less crucial wars of professionals in the 17th century. We had not thought it necessary to bale out Napoleon III in 1871. In 1914 the incidental danger to our naval supremacy of Germans taking Channel ports tilted the scales. Beneath that rationale lay our fear and jealousy of Germany’s surpassing us industrially, possibly taking world markets and colonies from us.

As America is now finding out, vis a vis Asia, if you no longer have the energy and ingenuity for economic domination, shows of military force will never save you. Being a “superpower” will ruin you. Being an imperial power will adulterate your stock and disintegrate your nationhood. Germany was already haunted by similar fears, seeing Russia’s rise—and America’s quick overtaking of its own industrial lead.

Our quixotic intervention in 1914 opened a can of worms whose consequences we are still suffering. In a way, the European War of 1939-41 was only an epilogue. For civilisation the Great War was Europe’s cataclysm.

Posted by Robert Reis on Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:47 | #

Amalek: the name has a lovely ring to it, it surely does.

Cheers!

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:15 | #

Here‘s a log entry that contains some good summaries of what’s going on and why. (I have no idea who the blogger “Hajo” is. Iceman of Prozium’s Odessa Syndicate blog has recently taken this “Hajo” on as a blogger there.)

Posted by DavidL on Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:00 | #

For any American, reading this article by Peter Hitchens is both humorous and maddening at the same time.

He and his brother (Christopher ) are a rare set of Hegelian siblings - one thesis, one antithesis and we get
the resulting synthesis ( excrement).

“The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA.” Why ? Our military is the enforcer arm
of the “bankster cryptocracy”. They only need bases, not whole countries, to strongarm nations.
Your “empire” was busted up so international corporations could squeeze every last useful commodity out of these
countries by loading them up on debt they could never repay your “City of London” hooligans.

“Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU” Why all the hatred of Germans ? Your very own Royal Family
is Teutonic in origin ( House of Windsor - NOT!!!!!!!!!!!). And to boot, while most of continental Europe has lost their
currency identity you still have your precious Pound ( doing a damn sight better than the Dollar).

As to being your “special friend”, long have your elite tried to enslave our nation. Hopefully, for all of us, American and
European they will fall short of the mark.

Posted by torgrim on Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:27 | #

Captain Chaos;

“Lindbergh was right.”

Amalek;

“Our quixotic intervention in 1914 opened a can of worms whose consequences we are still suffering. In a way, the European War of 1939-41 was only an epilogue. For civilisation the Great War was Europes catalysm.”

Charles Lindbergh Sr. was a member of the House from the state of Minnesota. It seems that he had made many enemies. He opposed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, and like his son, a generation later, opposed the Great War. As a consequence, the money lenders, supported another candidate and Lindbergh Sr. lost his Office.
The farmers lost too, but managed to organize around the Non-Partisan League and had for a short time some representation.

Being of Scandinavian ancestry, he was well aware of his position as a new comer, to the seat of power in DC and New York, as Scandinavians were, just beginning to find their way into the political arena. This pretty much ended after 1913. Mostly, Scandinavians were of the free farmer class, the Yeoman or Bonde, the middle class of Norway. The Fed Act was seen correctly by the farmers as a threat. It gave unlimited control of money to the bankers, railroads, etc.

Charles Lindbergh Sr. saw this and attempted to stop this coup.

http://www.clubconspiracy.com/f40/your-country-war-whathappens-you-5851.html

http://killthebank.wordpress.com/

Posted by torgrim on Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:41 | #

About the link…

http://www.clubconspiracy.com/forum/f40/your-country-war-whathappen-you-5851.html

please go to the ‘books’ section and press the link for, “Your Country at War” by Charles Lindbergh.

This link tells of Sr. Lindbergh’s book being taken off the printers machines and confiscated by the US Government, also about using troops to break up meetings of farmers when Charles Lindbergh was to speak and using force to shut him up.
The Governor of Minnesota was a supporter of the farmers. He died in office around the same time as Mr. Lindbergh Sr. I wonder?

Posted by Philipa on Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:15 | #

Scrutiny of WW2 is always going to be revealing and helpful in considering future (and present?) actions, so yes, I agree with you and well said that man in wondering if this was just an opportunity for Peter to voice some things he’d long considered before now. If he hadn’t questioned received opinion of the great wars then I can only assume it is like his fond embrace, without question, of religion - he doesn’t want to question it. But here we see at least some questioning of events though I don’t necessarily agree with the views presented in the two books and think Peter correct when he says saving the jews was accidental in that it was not the main motivation. Camps like Auschwitz were set up for the best reasons, humanitarian reasons. Unfortunately one mans humane social solution is another mans genocide. What starts as the intended gentle euthanasia of hopelessly sick, injured or mentally ill people grows into ‘ethnic cleansing’. I’m sure Hitler was a “highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism” - I’m convinced of that. You see, it’s the charmers, the most impressive amongst us, the really great leaders who could lead, with their persuasion and personal magnetism, all of us to do something we would otherwise not do. If left alone. To think. And we should think and we should question expecially those who suggest uncomfortable things for our benefit, like detention without trial, like torture and like the loss of habeus corpus.

China tackles population control for the good of the people, how? Things can start with the best intentions and end up as atrocities. I too will welcome further consideration and debate on these issues and think Peter Hitchens perfectly suited to comment. If only it wasn’t for the blasted Daily Wail agenda. He should write another book.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:36 | #

Yes, Philippa, another book would be the way to do it. In print journalism the best Peter Hitchens can do is this model of Britain aided and abetted by a self-interested America, and locked in an eternal struggle with the irridentist Teut.

That’s not good enough, of course. The more profitable context for re-assessing the European Wars is as a conflict between nation and internationalism, the first without, as yet, a truly appropriate political and philosophical form, the second a child of the individualist zeitgeist.

Whether Hitchens himself conceives the issue at this level, we cannot know. But it is, as you say, difficult to believe that he is completely unaware of it, though that is his clear inference.

There is one other, disturbing possibility. Like Mark Stein, Anthony Daniels, Lawrence Auster and many others, Peter Hitchens serves the purpose of deflecting popular inquiry into harmless ends. The others have their (very often ethnic) reasons, of course. But if Hitchens is merely another child of liberalism - an individualist, a journalistic hedonist - he might be satisfied with the egoistic wages he receives for his service in the diversion of the masses. In that event, he will harbour no wish to think in revolutionary terms.

As I said in the post, if he proceeds further from this point, I shall have to re-assess him. For the moment, he remains in my estimation a triangulator and an entertainer, albeit it an unsettling one, in the same sense that his brother is of that constitution.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:58 | #

Over at Prozium’s, new blogger Hajo <a >replies</a> to his thread commenters. (Again, I don’t know who this Hajo is, but I would call this entry of his a must-read.)

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:01 | #

Sorry, I’m using Internet Explorer as my browser, and either it or this new machine I’m at won’t embed links into text. But you can pick out the URL from the above. It’s this:

http://blog.odessa-syndicate.com/2008/04/21/replies-to-my-recent-post/

Posted by R.E. Prindle on Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:33 | #

Hitchens is exactly right on all counts. Let’s hope this isn’t a false dawn.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:46 | #

“Hitchens is exactly right on all counts. Let’s hope this isn’t a false dawn.” (—R.E. Prindle)

And let’s hope Hitchens’ dawn transitions to blazing high noon: he may be exactly right on all counts but he has lots more counts to be right on which he hasn’t even gotten to yet. So far, he’s just scratching the surface.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:38 | #

Jack, you do wonderful work at your blog. By the way, anyone considering reading that Red Ken exposé of yours had better swallow a couple of anti-emetics first (a couple? more like a couple of handfulls) — either that, or ... well, just don’t be wearing your best clothes when you attempt it ...

Posted by Yuezhus on Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:14 | #

While war was officially declared on Germany by Britain, for invading Poland, it would be a long while indeed until actual hostilities began. ‘The Phoney War’ was the affectionate term given to the stagnant conflict by beleaguered Poles who had expected genuine, swift aid.

At this point, the British side would still be striving towards diplomatic solutions.

But then Nazi Germany invaded France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, bombing many cities into oblivion.

Then it killed 40,000 British civilians in bombing raids.

Sorry, Germany. You were a genuine threat too close to home, and you ruined what was once an amiable relationship with Britain with your stance against Communism. Britain did not go to war for Jews, or international finance or multicultural decadence, but to stave off what was all too quickly becoming a totalitarian, bloodthirsty menace looming on their doorstep.

And letting the Soviet Union easily invade Poland two weeks after you did? Nice going, Germany. You had diplomats from all over the place splurting out their coffee on hearing of this unthinkable maneuver. Absolutely no one could’ve expected such a bizarre course of action, especially since you had created the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in dark secrecy, unlike the Anglo-Polish Defence pact, which was in plain sight to Germany prior to Poland’s invasion. The Soviets could never have invaded Poland so quickly on their own.

Nazi Germany’s autistic perspective of foreign relations aside, I don’t consider the non-Soviet Allied forces to have been the beacon of Hope and Good in Europe. Both sides were ridiculously naive and shortsighted, just in vastly different ways.

I can’t agree with Buchanan and other revisionists who point the finger of blame on Britain for starting World War I. France was also a powerful player in European geopolitics at the time, and the power that made the Versailles Treaty so unfair on the Germans, in remembrance of the earlier reparations France had to pay after losing the Franco-Prussian War.

Both Wars were pointless. Both sides were idiots. Had Hitler one, Europe would be ethnically pure, yes, but it would be a veritable hell hole in Eastern Europe, if for all of Europe, to a lesser extent. America would remain unaffected.

I simply would’ve gone back in time and convinced Gavrilo Princip to chill the hell out and not unwittingly ruin the 20th century.

Posted by PATRIOT on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:23 | #

Yes, World War II was completely pointless, it was all a conspiracy concocted by Jewish Communist Homosexuals to distract Americans while they slowly allowed Mexicans and Irish to invade their nation. Now Communists control the media, and it never would have happened if not for World War II.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:24 | #

“PATRIOT,” just above, also signs in the “Iraq and Heartland of the Coalition” thread as “WHITE POWER” and elsewhere, I suspect, as “John.” The third post in the “Iraq and Heartland” thread, signed “John,” is confusing because it seems at first glance to be the product of a non-diseased mind, leaving you wondering if there aren’t two different “Johns” posting comments at the moment, one normal, the other degenerate with brain leprosy. But on further consideration I believe the last-mentioned post by “John,” the one that seems at first glance normal, is also intended by this diseased individual as subtle pro-race-replacement sarcasm. As I’m pretty sure there used to be a poster signing as John here who wasn’t diseased, this must be a new “John.”

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:33 | #

Throw “Manly” into the mix of aliases this degenerate uses (in the “Conscious Decision Belated” thread).

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:45 | #

Oh, and “PALESTINE FOREVER,” of course, in the “Ben Stein” thread: it’s all from the same piece of excrement signing with different names.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:48 | #

I just noticed the same pile of dog excrement is posting comments signing as “James” over at the “Los Angeles on the Leading Edge” thread.

Posted by The pile of dog excrement on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:59 | #

The first John wasn’t me, no.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:28 | #

Peter’s younger brother speaks out, rightly of course, against the current Jewish-imposed practice of punishing all expressions of doubt as to the WW-II gas chambers or the number of Jews killed. It’s in the first video at the link. (The second video is devoted entirely to condemning religion, a stance I don’t happen to endorse.)

Posted by Jones on Tue, 24 May 2016 23:29 | #

I have read this from wikipedia not long time ago.
During World War II, approximately 500,000 American Jews served in the various branches of the United States armed services. Roughly 52,000 of these received U.S. military awards. The historian Solomon Grayzel, in A History of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Present, records that more than a million Jews were officially enrolled in the fighting forces of the Allies and that the largest number were Jewish Americans. Jewish partisans also fought throughout occupied Europe and were organized into groups such as the Bielski partisans, United Partisan Organization and the Parczew partisans. Jewish Partisans took part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Warsaw uprising and many other battles throughout the war. Approximately 200,000 Jews serving in the armed forces of the Soviet Union lost their lives during the war.

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