What did you do in the war, Michael?

MICHAEL FOOT famously told the 1981 Labour Party conference that he was an ‘incurable, inveterate peace-monger’. However Foot’s record in the Second World War gives the lie to this

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Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, Michael Foot: a portrait, Holder and Stoughton, pp216, hbk £8.95, pbk £4.95.

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Hoggart and Leigh’s journalistic potboiler contains a quick account of Foot’s co-authorship of the bestselling Guilty men (Gollancz, 1940), a histrionic attack on Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and a dozen other right-wing politicians for their lack of enthusiasm for waging war against Germany. For Foot the men who failed to rearm against Hitler in time were guilty: they were responsible for the debacle of Dunkirk – for ‘the story of an army doomed before they took the field’.

Foot’s diatribe against the appeasers had a simple message. Apart from some honourable exceptions such as Churchill, the Tories, Foot argued, weren’t patriotic enough. They lacked sufficient ruthlessness in prosecuting the military interests of British imperialism.

So much for our inveterate peace-monger.

The authors’ boudoir history ignores the political significance of Guilty Men. It also ignores another episode in Foot’s wartime career  – one that has, however, been exposed in Martin Middlebrook’s recent book The battle of Hamburg (Allen Lane, 1981).

On the night of 27 July 1943, Bomber Command launched one more raid on Hamburg. As usual, it aimed north of the Elbe – at areas which were almost entirely residential or commercial, rather than military. But this time it took more phosphorous incendiaries than was normal.

That night 40,000 German civilians, including 22,500 women and 5400 children, were incinerated in the streets or asphyxiated in air-raid shelters. In terms of civilians killed, nearly as many died this way as died in Britain throughout the war. Such was the devastating loss of life that criticisms of the raid were even made in official quarters.

At the time Michael Foot was editor of the Evening Standard. He received a number of articles attacking the RAF’s bombing campaign.

He declined to print them.