Looking Back on a Calamity
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Looking Back on a Calamity The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s By Piers Brendon Norton. 795 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The title of...
...He has succeeded pungently and irreverently, although his anecdotal style occasionally skids off into irrelevant gossip...
...In 1937 the American gunboat U.S.S...
...But worldwide the central experience was the Depression that had begun in 1929...
...Brazil, the price of coffee...
...Someone else (the sources are frequently fuzzy) opined she had spent her youth in "much seduced circumstances...
...Duranty," says Brendon, "was the most cynical: Privately he acknowledged that the famine had killed millions...
...After Manchuria, Japan started with unrelenting savagery on China proper...
...From him, a good question...
...Argentina saw the wheat and livestock prices collapse...
...Unlike her deferential English rivals," says the author, "she had no hesitation in meeting Prince Charmmg's quasi-masochistic needs...
...The author does not share the new revisionist view that Hirohito was a hawk...
...His was no ideological revolution but one dictated by the circumstances...
...Of Nazi devotion, he writes, "one group of blonde maidens vowed to Heil Hitler and give the Nazi salute at the point of orgasm...
...Few who experienced the 1930s are likely to think of them as the good old days...
...Only the Soviet Union purported to be Depression-free...
...Even his opinion of Hitler was seriously flawed...
...Panay was sunk...
...Gripping and insightful as well are his historical set pieces on, among other things, the Treaty of Versailles, the Spanish Civil War, Japan's murderous aggression in China, Mussolini's megalomaniac adventures, the rise of Hitler, and the Anglo-French drama of appeasement...
...For Brendon, the Spanish Civil War was "the hinge between global slump and global war...
...While taking many of the major and minor players off their pedestals, the writer tells us, "I endeavor to make the dry bones live, to clothe them with flesh and blood...
...Edward, says Brendon, "continued to behave as though he were Prince of Wales—the slight, baby-faced, buttercupblond playboy of the Western world...
...This led to the seizure of Manchuria in 1931...
...The crisis was even more prolonged than the War...
...Brendon presents no unfamiliar occurrences, but he suggests in colorful detail how what happened came about...
...Yet, he had changed parties twice and policies so often that his friend, the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, declared he had held every view on every question...
...Stalin's cheering section overlooked the horror even during the Grand Guignol of the 1930spurges...
...The Dark Valley is a generally fascinating book...
...The incredible slaughter of trench warfare not only caused the societies of Britain, France and Germany to hemorrhage, it destroyed the traditional world order...
...in the New York Times he denied its existence, employing the Soviet euphemisms about 'supply difficulties' and 'food shortages.' In a classic piece of obfuscation he declared: 'There is no actual starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.'" Not even the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 shook the sympathies of some...
...For a long time he admired Mussolini and supported Franco...
...Brendon calls it the largest organized famine in history, until Mao killed 20 million in his Great Leap Forward...
...Churchill had friends in Germany supplying him with information about its rearmament...
...Fanatical young officers sought to purge the nation through terror at home and aggression abroad...
...Malaya of rubber...
...Women became less fertile...
...The Depression not only fostered extremism, it also undermined liberalism...
...He more or less condoned the Japanese seizure of Manchukuo...
...Quite properly, Brendon sets the stage forthe '30s by recalling World War I and its immediate aftermath...
...The Soviets advertised in American newspapers for 6,000 skilled workers, and 100,000 destitute unemployed applied to go...
...She once described herself as Wallis in Wonderland...
...Playing a cruel joke on the visiting American Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the Soviets took him to the gold mining camp of Kolyma, probably the most deadly in the entire Gulag Archipelago, and photographed him shaking hands with an inmate...
...Nations were economically cut off from one another, but they shared the common lot of poverty...
...While Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and—especially—Neville Chamberlain with his Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, steered a course of increasingly abject appeasement, Churchill warned that Hitler was heading for war...
...and Burma, of rice...
...His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was a decent man who did not understand what was happening around him and therefore, in effect, did nothing about it...
...What has gone down in history as the Rape of Nanking took between 50,000 and 60,000 lives...
...He denounced its anti-Semitism and "declared that Hitler's barbarous tyranny was inculcating a blood lust not seen since pagan times...
...One of the major players of the 1940s, Winston Churchill was not yet on the scene—or rather, he had been pushed offstage as the object of general mistrust...
...Neither the U.S...
...It sapped the Western will to resist Fascist aggression...
...His is a chatty work, weighty but not heavy, following Carlyle's maxim that history is essentially biography...
...Foreign warships guarding the Yangtse River were attacked...
...As wretched defendants at the show trials confessed to unspeakable—and impossible—counterrevolutionary crimes, the author comments, "New York Times journalist Harold Denny concluded with a classic inversion of the truth: 'There is free speech in the shadow of the executioner.' " Denny's predecessor, Walter Duranty, peddled the cliché, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs...
...It is perhaps overlong in spots, but it should engage those who remember the period as well as the many more for whom the 1930s are ancient history...
...The formidable Soviet propaganda machine, plus an odd chorus of Western intellectuals, had been singing the USSR's praises for years, while it built the most sinister police state the world has ever seen...
...With it he saved his country and overcame the arrogant totalitarian certainties arrayed against it...
...Malign gossip had it that she learned the arts of love in Chinese brothels...
...The Dark Valley is the Great Depression that disoriented and demoralized an already unhinged world...
...JUST AS Churchill's will to fight rallied the people of Great Britain, President Roosevelt restored hope to a country that had just seen Wall Street crash, General Douglas MacArthur fight the bonus marchers in Washington, D.C., and drought turn the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl...
...Chamberlain, nurturing an intense personal dislike of this Cassandra, kept him in the political wilderness until obliged to take him into the Cabinet upon the outbreak of the War on September 1,1939...
...When Stalin decreed the first Five-Year Plan and collectivized agriculture to provide the labor for industrialization, he liquidated the more successful peasants—the kulaks—altogether, killing some 10 million people...
...At one point the Japanese Army in the occupied region of Kwantung denounced Emperor Hirohito's order to withdraw...
...Edward's sapphire, the oldest crown jewel of all, jolted loose and fell to the ground...
...Perhaps because he had been bullied and spoiled throughout his early years, Edward yearned for a regime of strictness tempered with tenderness...
...In the spectacular funeral cortege his coffin, carried on a gun carriage, was surmounted by the Imperial State Crown with its fabulous jewels...
...Brendon writes, "he was brave, eloquent, witty, industrious, dogged, versatile and supremely talented, with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap...
...The new King, Edward VIII, exclaimed, "Christ, what will happen next...
...That symbol of empire, mortally ill, was dispatched by his physician in an act of euthanasia approved by the royal family to ease his suffering and "to ensure that his death was reported in the morning papers, notably the Times, rather than in 'the less appropriate evening journals.'" The King's death plunged England into mourning much as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, did in 1998...
...There was no question of armed reprisal...
...Elsewhere you find yourself wondering, was King George V really "a conscientious squire with anti-Semitic prejudice andapenchant forprostitutes...
...The consequent political and social upheaval was a hothouse for the grim totalitarian certainties of Communism, Fascism and Nazism, while freedom could descend to license and depravity, as it did in 1920s Berlin...
...Then came the stage when wealth was destroyed...
...The author sides with some revisionist historians who point out that Churchill was inconsistent and opportunistic toward the dictators during the 1930s...
...America, that of corn and cotton...
...Cuba, of sugar...
...At one point the Maltese cross at its apex, containing St...
...French statesman Paul Reynaud is quoted here looking back on the calamity: "The oceans were deserted, the ships laid up in silent ports, the factory smokestacks dead, long files of workless in the towns, poverty throughout the countryside...
...Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940...
...Some who survived, including a group of FinnishAmericans from Michigan, were trying desperately to go home—as was Paul Robeson's brother—when I was in Moscow in 1946...
...His life revolved around his American paramour, Wallis Warfield Simpson...
...In addition, it started unraveling the League of Nations and showed the emptiness of the "collective security" Hitler and Mussolini would sweep away...
...Piers Brendon, Keeper of the Churchill Archives and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, steps back to view the events of the decade and the people who gave them form...
...He was willing to believe that such a 'great man' might resurrect German honor without recourse to arms...
...The Brazilians threw their sacks of coffee into the sea, and the Canadians burned their corn in railway engines...
...And it did the same in Japan, worst hit of all by the economic crisis...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The title of this book captures its essence...
...The aerial bombing of civilians in Shanghai introduced that practice to modern warfare years before Guernica...
...Brendon's character sketches of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many others have backstairs touches but are serious studies...
...Men questioned the value of what they had learned to admire and respect...
...But President Roosevelt, constrained by prevailing isolationism, tamely accepted Japanese apologies and indemnities...
...Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck is limned as "a sly debauchee whose face was said to resemble that of a 'ravisher of little girls.'" There is the occasional whopper, too...
...nor Britain had the wherewithal...
...THIS 700-page volume, though, is by no means all fluff...
...Roosevelt was the quintessential pragmatist who understood that experimentation was far better than inaction...
...When the Führer came to power, however, Winston warned of the "tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit" in the Nazi movement...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
