Premature antifascists

I respect premature antifascists, but not premature anticommunists.

“Premature Anti-Fascist”

by Bernard Knox

I first heard the remarkable phrase that serves as my title in 1946 when, fresh out of the US Army, I went up to New Haven, Connecticut for an interview with the chairman of the Yale Classics Department, to which, taking advantage of the generous provisions of what was popularly known as the GI Bill, I had applied for admission to the graduate program for the Ph.D. in Classics. I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the BA I had received from St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third, and Housman, who failed completely). To jazz my application up a bit, I had included my record in the US Army, private to captain 1942-45. The Professor, who had himself served in the US Army in 1917-18, was very interested, and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle-stars for service in the European Theatre, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l’Ordre de l’Armée, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I had parachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. “Why were you selected for that operation?” he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the US Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic, and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XI^th International Brigade. “Oh,” he said, “You were a premature anti-Fascist.”

I was taken aback by the expression. How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one? In fact, in the ’30s, as the European situation moved inexorably toward war, the British and French governments (the French often under pressure from the British) passed up one timely opportunity after another to become anti-Fascist. They did nothing when Adolf Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations and began a massive rearmament program (except that the British government negotiated an Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler the right to build the U- boats that, in the early ’40s, came close to starving Britain into surrender). No action was taken when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, demolishing the buffer against an invasion of France created by the Versailles Treaty. They allowed Hitler and Mussolini to supply Franco with planes, tanks, guns and troops, while enforcing a so-called Non-Intervention Agreement that cut off supplies to the Government. They remained silent while Mussolini conquered Abyssinia and Hitler annexed Austria. And in 1938, they sold down the river for a ludicrous illusion of Peace in Our Time the only strong, democratic state in Eastern Europe that might have been a deterrent to Hitler’s plans for expansion, the Czechoslovak Republic. You couldn’t call Chamberlain, Daladier and Laval ‘timely anti-Fascists’. They declared war on Hitler in 1939 as he invaded Poland, a declaration that gave no help to the Poles, who were crushed between the armies of Hitler from one side and Stalin from the other. So what kind of anti-Fascists were they? My French maquisards had a phrase for the Frenchmen who, in 1944, as the Allied armies broke out of the Normandy pocket and raced across France in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht, finally tried to join the Resistance. Resistants de la dernière heure was their contemptuous name for them — ‘last-minute anti-Fascists’. It is a perfect description of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.

But in 1939, last-minute was too late. Too late to save the millions who died in the death camps; too late to save the soldiers and sailors who died in the campaigns in Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, at Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa and many other places Americans had never heard of; too late to save the civilians who, like the inhabitants of Guernica, died under the bombs in Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Hiroshima. It would have been better to be premature.

I did not, of course, say any of this to the professor. I kept quiet and was admitted, and resumed the study of those ancient authors whom I had left untouched for ten years, ever since, a few months after graduating from Cambridge in 1936, I left for Spain. What I did not realize (something the professor knew perfectly well) was that ‘Premature Anti-Fascist’ was an FBI code-word for ‘Communist’. It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before) they enlisted in the US Army. It was the signal to assign them to non-combat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotion they deserved. Not only did they deserve it; the Army needed them in responsible positions, for they were the only soldiers in it who had any experience of modern war, who had been bombed and strafed by modern German and Italian aircraft, who had faced German and Italian tanks, who had come under the fire of modern artillery, especially the Luftwaffe’s 88mm antiaircraft gun, which the German crews had found murderously effective against ground troops because of its high muzzle velocity. It was later the nightmare of the GIs in North Africa, Italy, and France.

What made me, and many others like me in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Canada and the United States, into premature anti-Fascists? I can speak only of my own case but it is, I think, typical of that of many of my contemporaries. I grew up, like most of my generation, haunted by the specter of what was known in England as the Great War, the war of 1914-18. My two earliest memories, in fact, are vivid pictures from that time. Some time in 1917, when I was barely three years old, I was carried, in the arms of a Canadian nurse who was boarding at our house in South London, across a street illuminated only by moonlight and the moving beams of the searchlights looking for German zeppelins overhead. Behind me came my mother, carrying my brother and sister, newly-born twins. We were hurrying to the bomb shelter, an underground taxi garage just across the street. My father was in the Army; he was engaged in the nightmare battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, a winter offensive in appalling weather conditions that won a few useless miles of muddy terrain at the cost of 300,000 casualties. The second picture is that of a Lee-Enfield rifle leaning against the wall of the sitting room of our house, and beside it a khaki kitbag with a helmet on top of it. It was my father’s equipment; he was home on 24-hour leave before sailing for Italy, where his regiment was sent to stiffen the Italian army after its disastrous defeat at Caporetto.

My father, like many veterans of that war, would never talk about it. But like most of my generation, I read all the books about it I could get my hands on Robert Graves’ classic Goodbye to All That, Henri Barbusse’s unforgettable Le Feu, the unacknowledged model for Remarque’s later All Quiet on the Western Front — and the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg. All that we read induced in us a horror at what seemed a senseless waste of human lives and a fear that, in spite of the League of Nations, war might recur. The secondary school I went to in 1926, the year my father died, confirmed my fears. Like most such schools it had a Cadet Corps, a military training program designed to produce potential junior officers for the next war. Every Friday I went to school in uniform khaki puttees, breeches, a tunic with highly polished buttons, and a peaked cap; after morning lessons we went out onto the school playground and were put through the rigors of close-order drill, carrying rifles that dated back to the Boer War at the beginning of the century. But Friday afternoon was only the beginning. We also had firing practice at the HQ of the local Territorial Regiment with rifles and also the Lewis gun, the light machine gun of the British Army in the Great War, and every summer we went off to a camp on the Isle of Wight, where we lived through two weeks of military training under canvas, our lives regulated by bugle-calls and enlivened by simulated combat maneuvers against the cadet corps of other schools located in the vicinity.

When in the autumn of 1933 I went up to St. John’s college in Cambridge, Hitler was already dictator of Germany and had begun his program of militarization of the country; the prospect of a renewed European war was now a grim reality. I soon joined something called the Anti-War Movement, which on November 11 organized a march to lay a wreath on the War Memorial. The inscription on the wreath read: ‘To the victims of imperialist war from those who are determined to prevent another.’ Naturally, we ran into opposition. November 11 in those days was not only a day of remembrance, it was also a sort of patriotic ceremony at which artificial poppies, reminiscent of those of Flanders, were sold by volunteers to raise money for wounded and hospitalized veterans. Our march through the central college area to the memorial was bitterly contested; not only were we pelted with fruit and eggs bought from nearby stores, we were also repeatedly charged by rugger toughs trying to break up our column. Though battered, we reached the memorial and deposited our wreath.

This demonstration, however, was only a symptom of a deeper malaise which affected us; we were worried not only about the possibility of war but also about the economic and political situation that produced it. And even if war was averted, we faced a bleak future. What would happen to us after three years of study and security at the university? England, like the rest of the world, was in the depths of the Great Depression, which seemed to have become a permanent condition. Even the professional optimists among the economic pundits could offer little hope of recovery. The Depression was a more dispiriting phenomenon in England than in the United States; the Roosevelt New Deal was no panacea but it was at least evidence of official concern, whereas the so-called National Government’s policy of retrenchment was a defiant manifesto of indifference to widespread distress. In 1933 unemployment figures in the British Isles reached a record high of three million (23 percent of all insured workers); the unemployment benefits on which their families had to live were just enough to keep them from starvation on a diet of bread and margarine, potatoes and tea. Looking back at it in 1966, Harold Macmillan, who had been Prime Minister but was a junior conservative MP in the 1930s, remembered his conviction that “the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down … Perhaps it could not survive at all without radical change … Something like a revolutionary situation had developed.”

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The communist dream would turn to ashes when the truth of Stalin’s totalitarianism became clear. But as the saying goes, the problem with communism was how it failed in its dream, while the problem with fascism was how it succeeded.