CORMAC Ó GRÁDA
Princeton University Press
£40
ISBN 9780691258751
REVIEWED BY
Fintan Lane
Best known in Ireland for his important contribution over many decades to the study of the Great Irish Famine, the eminent economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda has expanded his range in recent times with a short global history of famine across five millennia, as well as a collection of related essays under the compelling title Eating people is wrong. His latest book also deals partly with the effects of famine, though this is just one element in a comprehensive and innovative analysis of civilian casualties during the First and Second World Wars.
The first of these global conflicts was optimistically billed by H.G. Wells in 1914, and again in 1918, as ‘the war to end war’ because of assumptions that it was so devastating and extensive that it was unrepeatable and had effectively extinguished German militarism. It wasn’t long before the naivety of that belief was brutally exposed, and the death-toll in the Second World War was even more monstrous. Certainly, the Holocaust and genocide against the Jewish people by the Nazis exceeded anything inflicted during the preceding conflict.
A great deal has been written about both these wars, but for a long time the literature was dominated by military histories and work on the Holocaust, much of which, however, paid little attention to the suffering of the general civilian population. That has changed to some extent in recent decades. Notable studies include Alan Kramer’s academic monograph on mass killing in the First World War and, for a more general audience, Randall Hansen’s Fire and fury, which details the human costs of the Allied bombing campaign during the Second World War.
Describing the British contribution to the latter, Sir Arthur Travers ‘Bomber’ Harris—a key figure in that campaign—chillingly outlined the aims: ‘the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing’. Such methods and outcomes would now be considered clear breaches of international humanitarian law; however, despite the massive number of civilians slaughtered in the aerial bombardment of urban areas, Harris remained wholly unrepentant long after the war, mendaciously asserting that ‘all major wars are and always have been against the civil population’.
It is true, of course, that far more civilians than combatants were killed during the two world wars. Moreover, the core argument that underpins Cormac Ó Gráda’s meticulous and complex evaluation of the civilian experience is that the aggregate death-toll has been considerably underestimated up to now. Conservative scholarly estimates for deaths during the First World War have pointed to some 9.7 million civilians and 9 million combatants killed, while the figures for the Second World War were 25.5 million civilians and 15 million combatants. Ó Gráda instead argues that the aggregate civilian death-toll as a result of these wars was closer to a staggering 65 million fatalities and not the often cited—also horrifying—35 million figure, with human-made famine the biggest killer by a country mile.
The first three chapters of this book examine the impact of famine, defined as ‘shortages of food or purchasing power that lead directly to excess mortality from starvation or hunger-induced diseases’. As a wartime killer, famine can be prodigious but is often overlooked, almost as if such deaths are ‘natural’ because they’re not caused by directly applied violence. Total war disrupted society in ways that led to catastrophic levels of starvation across large regions, however, and with famine and malnutrition came diseases, such as typhus, malaria, relapsing fever and dysentery, which killed vast numbers of vulnerable civilians. The author observes that some famines were intentional, such as those caused by deliberate blockades—that of Leningrad by the Germans in the 1940s stands out—but many others were arbitrary by-products of war and devastation, where the well-being of local populations was simply disregarded.
Research has been published previously on several of these war-induced famines, but Ó Gráda must be commended for pulling together the disparate information to construct a coherent general survey that attempts to get a handle on the effects and the numbers who perished. As one would expect from an economic historian, he leans heavily on statistics to underscore his arguments, but this does not dispel the raw horror of what he is describing. Moreover, there are probably as many harrowing photographs in this book as there are charts and graphs.
His use of data is often as startling as he probably intended. Referring to ‘forgotten’ famines, for example, there is this telling reflection: ‘Twice as many succumbed to starvation in French mental hospitals during World War II as in the whole of the western Netherlands in late 1944 and early 1945, and twice as many again starved in German mental hospitals’. Later on, he calculates that around 40,000 people died in the French hospitals, while perhaps 90,000 succumbed in the German institutions. The marginalised and disesteemed are often the most vulnerable when chaos reigns.
At the conclusion of Chapter 2, Ó Gráda publishes an important table with mortality estimates for the major incidences of hunger and famine that he has identified as having occurred globally during the Second World War. The aggregate death-toll is between 20 and 21 million based on an end date of 1947. Unlike battlefield deaths, excess mortality as a consequence of famine and related diseases does not end once an armistice has been signed. War rarely concludes in an orderly manner. Indeed, as he points out elsewhere, there is also an argument for seeing the Russian civil war, for example, as a continuation of the First World War.
Other chapters focus on the key issues of genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual violence, mass displacement and the various other atrocities of war. Cannibalism is briefly investigated. Most readers will probably think of the Second World War when genocide is mentioned, but a brisk chapter on genocides during the earlier war indicates that the propensity to annihilate peoples, in whole or part, was not invented by Adolf Hitler. Genocides linked to the First World War include a number within the Ottoman Empire against Armenians and Greeks, but also the barbaric attacks carried out on the Jewish population in Ukraine by nationalist forces in 1919−20. Ó Gráda suggests that as many as two million civilians died as a result of genocide during the First World War.
As one would expect, the Jewish Holocaust and the insatiable cruelty of the Nazis receives extended treatment. Between 5.5 and 6 million Jews were murdered from a European Jewish population of some 11.4 million in what has been appropriately described as the greatest crime in human history. Anti-Semitism had deep roots in Europe and the Nazis weaponised it in Germany for their own grotesque political ends, but, as Cormac Ó Gráda argues, ultimately it was war that made the Holocaust possible. Also, Germans—though largely to blame—weren’t the only killers. Some Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Latvians, for example, participated directly in the killing, while there were many collaborators and enablers, such as those in Vichy France. In an excellent analysis of Jewish losses across Europe, Ó Gráda concludes that the role of pre-existing anti-Semitism was fundamental. This is a point worth remembering when considering what might have been in Ireland. How would the Irish have behaved if this country had been taken over by Nazi Germany? The truth is that we don’t know.
Ireland did not have the high levels of overt anti-Semitism that existed in, say, Germany, Poland or Ukraine in the early twentieth century, but it certainly existed. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up in Cork, the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Jew-boy’ were still commonly deployed as caustic insults to describe a financially tight-fisted or mean individual, and almost entirely by people who’d never met or seen a Jewish person in their lives. Prejudice against Jews was deep-seated. Didn’t they kill Christ?
The Nazis also slaughtered members of the Roma community, homosexuals, the disabled, communists and socialists. Hostility to the Roma community, in particular, remained resilient after the war. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, for example, in his book Europe and the Roma recalls an interview with a young female participant in arson attacks in 1991 in the German city of Rostock on homes meant for asylum-seekers. ‘If Gypsies had been burned to death, it wouldn’t have bothered me’, she observed. ‘Vietnamese yes, but Sinti and Roma … unimportant.’ As Ó Gráda amply demonstrates, during times of war such dehumanisation and bigotry can lead to mass killings, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.
This book was finished in early 2024 and in a short epilogue the author refers to the ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. Combatant deaths in Ukraine, he writes, far outnumber civilian deaths, though the exact figures are difficult to ascertain. In Sudan the war has caused mass displacement, and the impact on the civilian population has been considerable. In fact, since Ó Gráda completed this epilogue, widespread hunger and severe malnutrition among Sudanese civilians have emerged as direct consequences of the conflict. The same is true for Gaza, although in that instance it is the intentional outcome of an Israeli blockade.
Regarding ‘the number of civilian casualties relative to population’, he says that ‘the Israel–Hamas war has been in a different league’ and that the lack of ‘proportionality’ of the ‘Israeli response’ to the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 has drawn much criticism. Another view, of course, is that the Israeli assault on Gaza is less a response than an opportunity seized, and that catastrophe cannot be discussed now without addressing the issues of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Israel has shown no regard whatsoever for international humanitarian law and civilians have been massacred routinely.
In a chapter dealing with trauma and resilience, Ó Gráda reminds us that the scars from the extreme violence of war ‘are not just physical’. The effects of the two world wars were societal and personal. More positively, there have been attempts to ensure that none of this ever happens again. Following the horror of the Second World War, concerted efforts were made to protect civilians in future conflicts, particularly through the Genocide Conventions and the evolution of international humanitarian law. The creation of the International Criminal Court was also a key development. However, the efficacy of these constraints has been fundamentally challenged by recent events in Gaza. Where stands international humanitarian law when it is not enforced?
This is mostly a depressing book, but an important one. As an exploration of the intolerable human costs of war, it is a tremendous study. One thing is certain: no one who reads this will put it down with the feeling that war is a glorious thing.
Fintan Lane is an author and social historian.