Frederick Veale who died in 1976, was a well known member of the Brighton Branch of British Union before the war. By profession he was a soldier. He was also a prolific writer and a regular contributor to the “Nineteenth Century and After”, the famous monthly review whose policy was present objective and unbiased articles on home and foreign affairs. It was the type of serious publication we could do with today.
In addition to articles on economic and historical subjects, Frederick Veale wrote “Lives of Lenin” (1932) and “Frederick the Great” (1935). However, it was after the second World War that he really showed what he was made of. At a time when the victorious allies were baying for blood (at Tehran, when Churchill handed Stalin a “Sword of Honour” and Stalin demanded that Churchill and Roosevelt agree that 50,000 German officers should be shot after the war was over),
Frederick Veale wrote a book entitled “Advance to Barbarism” which was published in the United States as well as in Britain. It was updated in 1963 and is still available. In the book he pointed out that an appalling precedent had been set by the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal in 1945. For their judgements meant that in any future war the Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals of the defeated side could expect to be condemned to death for obeying the orders of their government. This was also the view of Field Marshal Montgomery. This also meant that the prosecutors were judge and jury in their own cases.
The dangers of such “victors justice” and of an interpretation of international law that meant that a tribunal could not be challenged by counsel, defendants or prosecution, and that its judgement was final and not subject to appeal, was immediately apparent to Dr. William R. Inge, the famous “Gloomy Dean” of St. Paul’s Cathedral who readily contributed an introduction to this book. The faked up atrocity of Marzabotto in Italy is likewise exposed, which in fact was a normal anti-partisan attack on the infamous Italian communist “Major” Lupo’s “Red Star” brigade.
In 1956, Frederick Veale wrote “Crimes Discreetly Veiled” , a devastating exposure of the Stalin Myth, the ghastly Katyn massacre, which the communists tried to pin on the Germans. The Murder of Mussolini and his girlfriend, the crimes of Dr. Petoit, and the unjust treatment of Admiral Raeder. Raeder’s real crime was that he had captured Norway before the British. The forward to this book was contributed by no less a person that Lord Hankey, who had been Secretary to the Imperial War Cabinet in the First World War, organiser of the 1919 Peace Conference, and a minister in the War Cabinet 1939-40. Lord Hankey shared many of Veale’s feelings about the lack of justice meted out to the losers after the war and says so in his own book “Politics; Trials and Errors”.
After June 1941 the successful prosecution of the war, suggested Veale, necessitated the creation of the convenient fictions, and “the most important of these fictions concerned the character of Joe Stalin.” Thus arose the “Stalin Myth”. The author had a very telling turn of phrase, exemplified by the following from “Crimes Discreetly Veiled”
“When in 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, the view that communism was only “liberalism in a hurry” had long been the view of the English speaking intelligentsia, when urged to accept the view by politicians, the man in the street naturally found little difficulty with complying. Once accepted it was but a short step to agreeing that Stalin was really only a sort of Georgian counterpart to Mr Gladstone”.
We salute out old Blackshirt comrade – a respected lawyer and a brave and honest searcher after historical truth and justice.
