Chris Bambery explains why the allies’ leaderships in the Second World War were fighting neither for democracy nor against fascism, but for their own imperialist interests

On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, 8,000 people took to the streets of Setif in Algeria under the slogan, ‘For the Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria’. They were waving the green and white flag which would become the flag of the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front, FLN) and then an independent Algeria.

The French colonial sub-prefect of Setif ordered his chief of police to intervene and seize the flags. He in turn responded, ‘All right, then there’ll be a fight.’ The police opened fire but were then overcome by the crowd. Weapons were seized and the demonstrators fanned out across the town attacking French colonists, killing 103.

In the repression that followed 500 to 600 Algerians were killed but other estimates put the figure as high as 6,000. The massacre in Setif marked a point of no return. It was the beginning of an eight-year liberation war in which one and a half million Algerians were killed before the FLN won independence. France systematically used torture and massacred civilians.

In the Far East, after Japan surrendered, following the US dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, British troops entered Vietnam and Indonesia. Both were controlled by the national-liberation movements which had fought the Japanese and now wanted independence from French and Dutch colonialism.

Britain was not having that. It had fought the war to preserve the Empire, and the new Labour government was true to that policy; so it was not going to end colonial rule, even it was that of France and the Netherlands.

On the ground, British troops (mainly Indian) were outnumbered and French and Dutch forces were far away. What to do? In both cases, the answer was to arm Japanese prisoners of war to fight the independence forces. The RAF, meanwhile, ruthlessly bombed Indonesian towns and cities. Eventually, French and Dutch forces did arrive but the war in Vietnam would last until 1975 and in Indonesia, the Dutch threw in the towel in 1949, granting independence.

The British also re-occupied Malaya. Malaysian tin and rubber were big money earners for a cash-strapped government back in London. Yet, much of Malaya was controlled by a Communist-led guerilla movement. They initially welcomed the British (as their Vietnamese comrades had) because that was what Josef Stalin in Moscow required, but the British were determined to suppress them.

Britain would fight a dirty war in Malaya using defoliants to destroy agricultural land, rounding up villagers and placing them in concentration camps and using torture on an industrial scale. It was the model adopted by the Americans later in Vietnam.

Why start with these events? Because as we celebrate VE day, a curtain will be pulled over why Britain was fighting World War II.

Not for democracy

It was not a war for democracy? When King George VI declared war on Germany in September 1939, he did so on behalf of the entire population of the Indian sub-continent. They had no say in it, of course. In 1943, some three-million people would starve to death in Bengal because the foodstuffs on which they relied, rice in particular, were being sent for sale for US dollars and to feed British forces on the border with Burma.

From 1933 until the German invasion of Poland, the British and French governments had appeased Hitler, feeding him territory in central Europe in the hope it would satisfy his appetite, and trying to direct Nazi aggression towards the Soviet Union. They had ensured the defeat of the Spanish Republic in the 1936-9 civil war, despite millions of people understanding that fascism could have been stopped there.

When in the summer of 1940, with German forces occupying Europe and standing on the Channel coast gazing at the White Cliffs of Dover, where did Churchill group the bulk of his military? The answer is Egypt, because British rule there ensured control of the sea route to India. For Churchill and Britain, the Mediterranean would be the key theatre of war due to its imperialist interests. For the USA and Russia, it was a side show.

Greece was another important link in the imperial sea route to India, the Jewel in the Crown of Empire, but the Nazis had occupied the country in 1941, inflicting a further humiliating defeat on the British, one of a long chain.

By the summer of 1944, the Communist-led resistance movement, ELAS, controlled the majority of the country holding popular assemblies, giving women the vote and running their own law courts.

When the Germans, faced with the Russian advance into the Balkans, pulled out, Churchill rushed troops there to gain control. ELAS welcomed the British, but the latter banned ELAS in December 1944. When demonstrators gathered in central Athens, security forces opened fire killing 26 and wounding 150. A vicious war developed between ELAS and the British, who re-armed Greek collaborationist units who had fought for the Germans.

Russia had agreed at the February 1945 Yalta summit, where Stalin, Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt had agreed the partition of Europe, that Greece would be in the British sphere of influence. Now Russia pressurised ELAS to stop fighting. Britain promised elections but these were rigged against the left. Thousands of leftists were jailed. Eventually, civil war broke out but the left lost when Russia pulled the plug on any military aid. Greece would have to wait until 1974 for democracy.

Not anti-fascist

Neither were Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union fighting a war against fascism. France was liberated in 1944. Exiled Spanish republicans were central to both the resistance and General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French army.

The Spanish republicans now believed they would have Allied help in toppling the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain and crossed the Pyrenees to fight. They were left to fight alone and face eventual defeat. Franco would die in his bed in November 1975 by which time Spain had long been a Nato member, hosting US nuclear bases.

Stalin had, of course, signed a pact with Hitler in August 1939, partitioning Poland and guaranteeing crucial supplies, especially oil, which drove the German victory in the West in 1940. Post-war, both blocs, the Western and Communist ones in Europe, ‘rehabilitated’ fascists and Nazis to work for them, especially in the security and secret services. The US space programme was driven in large part by Wernher von Braun, a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, who had developed the V2 rocket (the first ballistic missile) using slave labour. In 1945, the Americans whisked him away to work for them.

Of course, even the arch-imperialist Churchill was prepared to milk the popular anti-fascism of the majority of people in order to fight the war. Both my parents volunteered, my father quitting the Young Communist League over the Hitler-Stalin Pact. He was in East Africa in 1941 and in India in 1945 on route to Japan when the bomb was dropped.

He saw vicious colonialism and racism at work and knew Churchill was fighting for Empire. But both of them believed it was a war worth fighting to defeat fascism to the end of their days. Neither of my grandfathers thought their war, World War I, had been worth fighting. One returned from the Western Front permanently traumatised. The other suffered long-term unemployment. He never wore a poppy come November because it was the Earl Haig Fund which produced them and, for him, Douglas Haig was a butcher who had sent thousands to their deaths at the Somme and Passchendaele.

So, hundreds of thousands of people fought because they believed they were out to destroy fascism. However, World War II was an imperialist war in which both sides sought to re-partition the world in their own imperial interests. Stalin’s desires were modest; control of Eastern Europe so as to protect Russia’s borders. Churchill wanted to keep the Empire but, by 1945, that was impossible for a bankrupt country. With reluctance, Britain scuttled out of India and Palestine and the Union Jack would be hauled down in ex-colony after ex-colony.

The USA and Russia

The big winner was the USA. It re-ordered the international economic order (excluding the Communist bloc, and later China) in its own interest: the international rules-based order we know today. During the war, Roosevelt had used rhetoric about it being a war for democracy but post-war, as the Cold War gathered pace, the USA would back every dictator and autocrat against the ‘Red Menace’, plus crush the left at home.

One final point. For most of World War II in Europe, from June 1941 onwards, the Soviet Union was fighting 75% of German and Axis forces. Even in April 1945, as the Western allies advanced into the Third Reich, the Red Army faced two thirds of German forces. Put simply, the Russians won the war in Europe.

This is not to diminish Western Allies’ June 1944 D Day landings and the campaign which followed but, almost simultaneously, the Russians launched the biggest offensive of the war, Operation Bagration, which brought them to the border of the Third Reich. Stalin and his military commanders understood they could finish off Hitler without Anglo-American help.

The USSR suffered 26.6 million casualties during World War II, including 8.6 million military deaths and an estimated nineteen-million civilian deaths. Stalin fought an inept war at the early stages and a brutal one from start to finish, not least in regard to his own troops, but that the Soviet Union was key to victory cannot be denied.

Sorry, I am wrong about that. There will be a silence about Russia’s role amidst the eightieth anniversary of VE Day because it does not fit with the current Western narrative.

No one will remember those massacred in Setif on that first VE Day. However, those Algerian rebels, along with their Vietnamese and Indonesian comrades, would destroy colonialism. That’s worth celebrating.