One summer vacation during my student days at Oxford I worked at the BBC's listening station at Caversham in Reading, as a member of the team monitoring English-language radio broadcasts from Moscow. This was in the Brezhnev era, when relations between the USSR and the West were stiff at best.

My first week in the job was hair-raising. So aggressive was the rhetoric streaming from Moscow against Nato that I was convinced war was imminent, and told my relatives to get to Scotland as soon as they could. At the same time, to make sense of what was coming through my earphones I read every newspaper and foreign affairs magazine I could get. With context, proportion entered: I no longer heard the threat of war, but the sound of beleagurement, fear, futile bravado. The fall of the Berlin Wall was only a decade away.

Nicholson Baker's book of contextless, paragraph-long gobbets consisting of excerpts and reports from newspapers, diaries, letters and books dating from the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the United States' version of the Second World War in 1941, has the same effect as that first week at Caversham. The relentless little passages build into a jigsaw picture of madness and war-mongering, depicting a world hell-bent on war, nations arming themselves and provoking others, everyone licking their lips at the thought of bombing, bloodshed and bodies.

And every now and then a pacifist voice, a warning voice, a voice trembling with horror and anxiety at the thought of a resumption of hostilities, just about makes itself heard above the tramping feet of armies marching towards the conflict they expect and desire.

Such is the impression Baker seeks to give by letting a host of individuals speak for themselves in snatches and asides: Churchill, Roosevelt, “Bomber” Harris, “Boom” Trenchard, Japanese admirals, Chinese nationalists, soldiers, politicians, diplomats, bankers, pilots, arms manufacturers and arms dealers, all plotting war, wanting it, working for it: the idea that the Second World War was the Allies' just war, a good war waged against wicked aggressors and genocidal maniacs, is thus challenged, even perhaps refuted, by the self-accusing evidence in what Baker quotes.

It is undeniable that what Baker quotes was indeed said. For all that he is a novelist whose method is the accumulation of minutiae, he is not making things up. Relentlessly, the quotations he accumulates damn the interwar ruling elites of the Allied nations out of their own mouths, convicting them of having fomented war just as much as the Axis powers.

Or does it? The key point is the Caversham point: context. To read Baker's gobbets is to think that the US spent years deliberately provoking Japan by selling military equipment to China, building bases around the Pacific, and massing large war fleets to sail it. Increase the size of the frame a little and see why: the reason was the long-term Japanese military build-up, which started well before its war against Russia in 1905, its annexation of Korea, its invasions of Manchuria and then China, and its posture of military rivalry in the Pacific. Following Baker's line of thought, the United States' response should have been - disarmament?

Baker quotes admiring things that Churchill wrote about Hitler and Mussolini. He does not quote Churchill's warnings about them, and his castigation of Britain's relative military unpreparedness and Chamberlain's efforts at appeasement, to demonstrate that Churchill's admiration had tight limits; rather, these are alluded to only as further evidence of war-mongering. He quotes, with all the moral weight of hindsight, the lack of sympathy shown to Germany's Jews by Roosevelt and the British Establishment - but it is a puzzle why, with the same hindsight, he still implies that the Allies should not have waged war on Nazi Germany.

The Allies did not fight to save the Jews, but the Jews who survived in large part did so because the Allies fought and won. Can the doctrine of double effect not be allowed to apply, in hindsight, on a logical par with the culpability of prewar Allied anti-Semitism, which post-Holocaust hindsight makes worse?

Baker makes his pacifist case strongly - if one leaves the context out of account. And I am with him in his condemnation of war and its Machiavellian machinations. He is right to expose the brutality of attitudes that result in terrible things happening in war - and these are the brutal attitudes of Churchill and other heroes of the Allied cause. Certainly, if the 1919 arrangements had been made more wisely, there might not have been the economic collapse of Germany and other events that led to more war in the 1930s. But once Hitler's armies began to move, there was no question of pacifism: the Allied waging of war between 1939 and 1945 was one of the few cases of justified war that history has to show. But I enjoyed the book: it is fascinating, chilling, instructive, gripping.

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
Simon and Schuster, £20, 566 pages Buy the book here

Extract

Winston Churchill visited Rome. “I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers,” Churchill said in a press statement. Italian fascism, he said, had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces; it had provided the “necessary antidote to the Russian virus.” “If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism,” Churchill told the Romans.

It was January 20, 1927. The Royal Air Force announced the staging of a mock bombing exercise at its annual air pageant in Hendon, north of London. It was June 11, 1927.

The New York Times described the Hendon event in advance: “The ‘town,' which will be built largely of airplane wings, will be bombed to bits. Airplanes will drop food

and ammunition to the European ‘refugees,' who will be fleeing after having escaped from the citadel in which they have been ‘beleaguered' by the town's native inhabitants.” The town was located in the imaginary land of Irquestine.

Two hundred airplanes were going to fly to the music of a song called Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken. When the singer sang “Lay a little egg for me,” the planes were to release their bombs.

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