The British Art Historian Who May Have Helped Prolong World War II

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Apr 17

One of the most compelling, but depressing, World War II films is 1977’s “A Bridge Too Far.” It tells the not-widely-known (until then) tale of Operation Market Garden, a daring move in mid-September, 1944, by American and British forces, conceived by British field marshal Bernard Montgomery (who persuaded Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to approve it) to speed the Allies’ march on Berlin by bypassing the heavily fortified Siegfried Line and instead crossing the lower Rhine river.

Market Garden was the largest combined ground and air operation ever attempted. It entailed the simultaneous seizure of Dutch bridges between the cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen by 25,000 American paratroopers; the seizure of the Rhine crossing at Arnhem by 10,000 British troops landing by glider and parachute; and a 64-mile race by British armored divisions covering the distance in 48 hours to join their compatriots in seizing that city. Had the operation succeeded, the war might have ended four months earlier than it did.

Unfortunately, as the film depicts, owing to a series of mishaps, including bad weather that delayed a scheduled second drop of British and Polish parachutists, Market Garden proved to be a disastrous failure. (In war, major mishaps, even catastrophes, are inevitable; as Ken Burns’s classic series “The War” notes, it was during World War II that the obscene acronyms “FUBAR” and “SNAFU” were coined to allude to operational messups.) But a new book by historian Robert Verekaik, The Traitor of Arnhem, suggests that two individuals, neither of them members of the uniformed military, may have played a crucial rule in bringing about the debacle, by providing crucial intelligence about the Allies’ plan to the enemy. One of them was a Dutch double agent, Christian Lindemans, who earlier in the war had assisted downed Allied airmen, Jews, and Dutch fugitives to attain safety by crossing into Spain, but became a Nazi informant following five months of solitary confinement by the Germans followed by the arrest of both his wife and his Communist brother. When British military intelligence entrusted him to sneak past German lines and contact the Dutch resistance just before the launch of Market Garden, Lindemans instead “surrendered” to a Wehrmacht patrol and then briefed General Kurt Student about the plan. His information led the Germans to move antitank battalions into the British forces’ path, delaying them by “10 to 15 hours,” Verekaik reports, and then blocking the Brits’ landing near Arnhem, in light of Lindemans’s account of “the thrust and direction” of their attack.

But the true “traitor” of Verekaik’s title isn’t Lindemans. Rather, it was “a shadowy source deep in the heart of the British state” who had sent an even more detailed report of the Allied plan through the German military attaché in neutral Sweden. Only “a tiny handful of Allied generals were privy to that level of operational intelligence.” Verekaik identifies this so-called “Agent Josephine” as Anthony Blunt, one of several Soviet spies, coming from upper-class backgrounds, who took advantage of the military emergency of 1940 and “old school friends and family contacts” to insert themselves into high levels of British intelligence. By 1942, Blunt had risen to “the crossroads” of the country’s MI5, gaining “extraordinary oversight of all secret activity” the military conducted. Having been assigned to Allied headquarters earlier in 1944, he played a key part in Operation Fortitude, which misled the Germans about the intended location of the D-day landings. A month before the landings, as Verekaik reports, Blunt transmitted a copy of the plan to the Soviets.

Knowledge of the Market Garden operation would in turn have been of even greater interest to Stalin, since even though Russia (at least nominally) was an ally of the anti-German forces, by the fall of 1944 it would have been apparent to the Soviet dictator that Hitler was bound to lose the war (being caught between Russian advances on the east and Allied advances, following D-Day, on the west) – and Stalin was thinking ahead to the postwar situation. Verkaik cites a “serious possibility” that Blunt and another Soviet agent at Allied headquarters “colluded” in “minimizing intelligence which might have seen Market Garden called off” – (Perhaps, I surmise, possessing that intelligence might have had the effect of delaying the operation only briefly in a way that would have enhanced the likelihood of its success.)

As British historian Dominic Green, reviewing Verekaik’s book in the Wall Street Journal, observes, while hundreds of thousands died in the remaining eight months of the war, its continuance enabled the Russians to capture “Berlin and half of Europe” – whereas “[i]f Market Garden had succeeded, the history of the Cold War would be different.” (I have described Russia as “at least nominally” an ally of the anti-Nazi forces, given the evidence that historian Sean McKeen provides in his monumental 2021 book Stalin’s War of how Soviet communism was rescued during the war by “self-defeating strategic moves” by the U.S. and Britain, beginning with Lend-Lease, agreeing “almost blindly” to all of the dictator’s demands, enabling Stalin’s armies, including their Chinese allies, “to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.”)

But it is the figure of Anthony Blunt that I wish to focus on here. Not until 1979 did British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reveal, in response to a Parliamentary question, that the (knighted) Sir Anthony had secretly confessed, fifteen years earlier, to being the previously unidentified “fourth man” in the Cambridge University Communist spy ring, following the defection to the Soviet Union in 1951 of Guy Burgess and Donald McLean, following a tipoff from their leader, Harold “Kim” Philby, who had led British intelligence’s anti-communist counter-espionage program from 1944-46. (Philby followed suit in 1963.) (While Blunt's name had emerged during investigations into the defections of Burgess and Maclean, he never admitted his guilt at that time despite being interviewed eleven times. Only years later, thanks to revelations by American publisher Michael Straight, recounting his own recruitment by the Soviets when a classmate of Blunt’s, was Blunt forced to confess.

Thatcher explained that despite his 1964 confession, Blunt had been granted immunity from prosecution in a secret deal with the authorities, who subsequently justified it by saying that they didn’t want to risk losing Blunt’s “cooperation.” (It isn’t clear what further information if any that cooperation ever revealed.)

In his secret confession, Blunt admitted to having become an agent of Russian intelligence and a “talent-spotter” for the Soviets during his student days at Cambridge in the 1930s, having been drawn to Marxism by his classmate Burgess. British authorities are said to have been aware of his Marxist sympathies at the time of his recruitment, but not to have regarded him as therefore a security risk. (This gullibility is hard to comprehend given the Russo-German “nonaggression” pact of 1939, under which the Soviets had carved up Poland with Hitler while also seizing control of the Baltic republics). While leaving the intelligence service after the war to become a professor of art history at the University of London and director of the school’s Courtauld Institute, he admitted in his 1964 confession to having used his old contacts in Russia’s intelligence service to facilitate the defections of McLean and Burgess.

At the same time as his appointment to the university, it should be noted, Blunt became art adviser to Queen Elizabeth II, overseeing the royal collection. He earned a high reputation as both a scholar and teacher. Despite his 1964 confession, he retained his royal position until 1974 – reportedly because the security services still didn’t want to endanger his cooperation. One cannot avoid suspecting that it was his royal position that actually saved him from being prosecuted.

Although Blunt, at the time of the 1979 revelation, was said to “bitterly regret” his spying activities for Russia, he explained that he had engaged in them out of “idealism.” And even then, he was said by a friend and former student to have been “appalled” by Prime Minister Thatcher’s revelation of his activities. Reportedly, the government was forced to make the revelation after some former colleagues from MI5, angered at the privileged life Blunt continued to enjoy despite his treachery, leaked details of his spying career to the author Andrew Boyle who then wrote a book, Climate of Treason, in which Professor Blunt's character was thinly disguised as someone named Maurice (borrowing the name of a gay character in a novel by E.M. Forster).

In her statement, Prime Minister Thatcher, while noting that during his period in the Security Service from 1940 to 1945 Blunt had regularly passed to Russian intelligence anything that came his way which would be of interest to them, undoubtedly to the serious damage of British “interests,” maintained that it was “unlikely that British military operations or British lives were put at risk” by them. While Blunt’s knighthood was removed, it is clear that Robert Verekaik’s revelations dictate a serious correction of Thatcher’s assurance.

And yet, it is by no means clear how contemporary readers will judge Blunt’s treachery, even in light of Verekaik’s discoveries. As evidence: in 2001 a British writer named Miranda Carter published a partly sympathetic biography, tracing Blunt’s treasonous activities to his upbringing as a member of the Cambridge elite, attracted by new intellectual movements such as that of the Bloomsbury Group in the 1920s, followed by the Marxist phrase that began in the 1930s. And she attributed some of what she regarded as excessive denunciation of Blunt, once his spying was revealed, to his having been a homosexual, a practice that hadn’t been decriminalized in Britain until 1967, and remained an object of widespread moral condemnation (despite its widespread practice in the country’s elite, all-male boarding schools).

Of course, we all have our crosses to bear, some of them more laborious or painful than others. But the real lesson of Blunt’s career of treachery and that of his Cambridge peers (a fifth subsequently came to light) would seem to be the dangers of the poorly thought out political “idealism” in which so many of those bred to wealth (say, George Soros’s son) or even, in today’s America and other developed nations, just middle-class comfort, combined with “elite” education, are encouraged to indulge.

A more serious consideration of the sacrifices that our predecessors, both in America and in other constitutional democracies, made to secure and preserve our freedoms would be the most appropriate remedy. Let us hope that those who lead America’s educational system, from K-12 through college and graduate institutions, will take this lesson to heart, instead of merely emphasizing past injustices of which all nations are guilty to a greater or lesser extent, but our country far less than others in history. Had the Nazis triumphed in the Second World War, or the Soviets in the Cold War, nobody – regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation - would be enjoying much freedom to criticize their rule – or any other meaningful sort of freedom.