Michael Burleigh - Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II

Moral Combat sets out to examine the complexities of morality withing the Second World War, but ends up merely parroting the same arguments made by Western historians for years, namely that the Germans, Soviets, and Japanese are all guilty of war crimes (which is true) but that all actions by the British and Americans can be excused by the necessities of war.


Burleigh spends a considerable amount of time examining the myth of the "good German," or the German soldier (and by extension the Wehrmacht) who was not complicit in war crimes but was instead merely fighting for his country and knew nothing of concentration camps or other atrocities. He does a good job of puncturing this myth, and showing that even if they generally did not participate directly, they did know about the crimes and generally did not act to prevent them or mitigate the effects. Burleigh makes an interesting argument that in those cases where the Wehrmacht command did protest the slaughter of Jews on the Eastern Front it was not out of a sense of moral duty but rather because they feared that the influence of the SS actions would spread to the Wehrmacht troops who would join in, thereby dissolving military discipline.

One of Burleigh's biggest failings is that all atrocities committed by the Western Allies are looked at through the lens of German/Soviet/Japanese crime. He generally reaches the conclusion that while the Western Allies did commit atrocities they were either not as bad as those committed by the Axis and Soviet Union (and therefore are irrelevant) or were justified. In justifying attacks such as the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, he generally parrots the justifications made by Allied commanders at the time, that they affected Axis war industries (which they didn't) or more significantly that they were calculated to affect the morale of the civilians (which they didn't--at least not the way the Allies intended). In those cases where neither argument can be made, Burleigh's general thesis seems to be that it was war and that alone justifies it. He also makes a seemingly arbitrary distinction between the inaction of the Western Allies to stop the Holocaust (which he excuses as being both strategically irrelevant to winning the war and impossible anyway) and the inaction of the Soviets (which he condemns).

Moral Combat has an interesting premise, but in general does not do what it purports to; namely examining morality in World War Two. Instead, Burleigh spends the book examining Axis and Soviet crimes while excusing and justifying Western Allied crimes. While I certainly agree that the Axis and Soviet crimes are far more horrific than any committed by the Western Allies, Burleigh is not presenting any new information in Moral Combat, he is merely rehashing the same arguments that have been made for the last 70 years that define the war as a strictly black and white affair while ignoring the myriad shades of grey that actually defined it.