WW2History.com News

|   4 December 2010

Newly added

For subscribers to WW2History.com we had been planning to add a long essay on Adolf Hitler this month to the Key Leaders section, but because of the interest in last month’s competition on Stalingrad, we’ve decided to add an extraordinary piece of testimony instead. The essay on Hitler will appear next month.

Valentina Krutova was a child in Stalingrad during the war, and the history of how she and her elder brother and younger sister survived the horror is one of the most moving pieces of testimony I have heard from a survivor. I think we often focus too much on stories of soldiers in battle, and so to listen to the effect of war on children adds a crucial perspective to the history that is often lacking.

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 December 2010

November Competition result

The memorial to the battle of Stalingrad, overlooking the city.

Congratulations to Hannah Scott of County Durham who wins the November WW2History.com competition. She was the first person picked at random from the list of WW2History.com subscribers who gave the correct answer to the question: who commanded the Soviet 62nd Army at the battle of Stalingrad?

The correct answer was Vasily Chuikov. And a signed copy of Antony Beevor’s ‘Stalingrad’ as well as a DVD of the documentary ‘Stalingrad’ is on its way to our lucky winner.

Chuikov was an extraordinary military commander. He didn’t just lead his troops at Stalingrad with a determination and ruthlessness that staggers the imagination, he also – as I learnt first hand from a former officer under his command – treated his own immediate subordinates with considerable brutality. When, for example, an officer reported bad news, Chuikov was quite capable of beating him up with his fists or with a stick. It was a tough life in the 62nd… But then, I guess it had to be if they were to hold Stalingrad.

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WW2 Relevance

|   19 November 2010

Does it matter who becomes King or Queen?

We have no say over who wears the crown. Does it matter?

Looking at the interview this week with Prince William and Kate Middleton I thought two things. The first was – what a perfectly nice young couple. The other was – this perfectly nice young couple will become King and Queen one day, and not one citizen of the United Kingdom will ever have had any say about it.

But does it matter? After all, many years ago, when I was taught the history of the British Constitution, I was told that the great advantage of an unelected Head of State was not so much the power they possessed as the ‘power they denied others’ as a result of their presence. Trouble is, a study of the relationship between one British monarch and the Nazis has made me think that my teachers were somewhat naive about the nature of power. In fact, it can matter a huge amount who is King or Queen.

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WW2 Relevance

|   12 November 2010

Burma, Britain and Betrayal

Burma – or Myanmar as it is called today. A place with a terrible history.

The welcome news today that Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of Burma (or Myanmar as it was renamed) may be shortly released from house arrest, does little, unfortunately, to make one think that the appalling crew of gangsters currently running the country will finally bow to the will of the people and place her in power. But, to some extent, the horror of what is happening in Burma today has its roots in the Second World War – and the actions of the British.

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WW2 Controversies

|   5 November 2010

An epidemic of racism.

Singapore: ‘the worst disaster in British history.’

We’ve just added to the site for subscribers a video about the Japanese victories at the end of 1941 and the the start of 1942. And as victories go they didn’t come much bigger than the Japanese triumph at Singapore in February 1942, when more than 60,000 troops under the command of the British General Arthur Percival surrendered to around 35,000 soldiers of the Imperial Army. Churchill called it ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’. And still today historians argue over exactly why this could have happened.

My own view is that we massively underestimate just how racist the British were in their views about the Japanese. There’s a real danger in this history that since the British (and the Americans come to that) are perceived as the ‘good guys’ of WW2, we forget that racist views and racist values were not just the preserve of the Germans. Consider, for example, the views of the commander-in-chief of British forces in the Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, expressed after he traveled to the border of British territory with China, just before the outbreak of the war.  ‘I had a good close up, across the barbed wire [of the border],’ he wrote in 1940, to the Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff, ‘of various sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform, which I was informed were Japanese soldiers. If these represent the average of the Japanese army, the problems of their food and accommodation would be simple, but I cannot believe they would form an intelligent fighting force.’

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 November 2010

October Competition Result

Congratulations to Mr Atkinson of Northumberland, Mr Fenton of Argyll and Mr Steury of Virginia, USA, who were the first three subscribers selected at random from all of those who got the right answer to October’s WW2History.com’s members competition. A signed, hardback copy of Martin Davidson’s ‘The Perfect Nazi’ is on its way to you.

They correctly answered ‘Reinhard Heydrich’ to the question: ‘Who commanded the SD? This infamous Nazi, who was also a key figure in the development of the ‘Final Solution’, was eventually killed by agents sent by the British to Prague in the spring of 1942.’

I’ve always thought Heydrich one of the most interesting and sinister of all the Nazis. Many of the people I met who dealt with him personally were still affected by the experience, remembering him as both highly intelligent and supremely cold-hearted (Hitler called him the man with the ‘Iron Heart’).

The Nazi action to exterminate the Polish Jews was known as ‘Operation Reinhard’ in his ‘honour’. Something which, at one level, tells you all you need to know about this man’s legacy to the world.

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WW2 Relevance

|   26 October 2010

Selected news, selected history

Paris last week – distinctly lacking in violence and chaos….

I was in Paris for a few days at the end of last week. But I almost didn’t go, because the newspapers and TV news were full of reports about the mass strikes in France, held in protest at the proposed changes in the retirement age.

If you watched the news or read the papers you would have thought that pretty much the whole country was in flames. Which meant that I was shocked to emerge from Charles De Gaulle airport to discover something wholly surprising – calm. My taxi driver, as he drove me into the centre of Paris, told me that that he’d had to queue at a petrol station for diesel, but that was about the only inconvenience he’d faced. And in the whole time that I was in the French capital there was no sign of any disturbance.

Which isn’t to say that the media were making stuff up. There were strikes, and there were other instances of civil disturbance. It’s just that this was certainly not the norm. And the message I had taken from watching and reading about what was happening in France was that it was.

And that’s my point. Not just that news reporting is by definition selective, but that we select for ourselves the most relevant bits from a message that someone else has previously selected.

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WW2 Relevance

|   19 October 2010

Resistance to Hitler

Hitler’s bunker at the Wolf’s Lair in wartime East Prussia.

In Berlin, in the early evening of 20 July 1944, Ludwig Beck, one of the leading conspirators in the plot against Hitler, posed a vital question to a fellow conspirator, General Friedrich Olbricht.

Would the sentries who guarded their resistance headquarters be prepared to fight against the Gestapo when they appeared? Crucially, would they be prepared to die for Olbricht?

Olbricht replied that he was unsure.

It was a dramatic moment in the conspiracy, and one that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The problem Beck and his fellow conspirators faced was that they didn’t know whether Stauffenberg had managed to kill Hitler at his Headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia earlier that day. Reports differed. Some said Hitler was dead, others that the bomb Stauffenberg had planted had merely injured the German leader. And so, in the shadow of this uncertainty, Beck tried to hold the conspiracy together. It mattered not whether Hitler lived, he said, the time had come to fight back regardless. The only trouble was that many of his fellow conspirators didn’t see the situation in such black and white terms.

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WW2 Anniversary

|   12 October 2010

Invading Russia – the “sensible” option.

The Untersberg – mountain of myth

70 years ago, Adolf Hitler stood on the terrace of his house, the Berghof, above Berchtesgaden in southern Germany, and contemplated this view. The massive Untersberg, directly in front of him, was the mountain in which legend said that the Emperor Charlemagne slept, ready one day to rise again.

And in 1940, Hitler believed that a decision he had just reached would make him greater than Charlemagne, the man who created the German monarchy, greater indeed than any German who had ever lived. Because Hitler – and Hitler alone – had decided that Germany should invade the Soviet Union. With hindsight it seems to have been a catastrophic decision – one that led directly to Germany’s defeat. But that was not how most people saw it at the time. In fact, most German Generals thought that the decision to invade France in May 1940 had been much more risky – and that had brought victory in six weeks.

How much resistance could the Red Army – weakened by Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and broken by failures during the Winter war against Finland a few months before – actually put up? Well, most informed opinion agreed with General Jodl of the German High Command who said the Soviet Union would be ‘proved to be a pig’s bladder; prick it and it will burst.’

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WW2 Relevance

|   4 October 2010

Over sexed and over here.

How can we calculate the cultural impact of the Americans on Britain in WW2?

We’ve just added onto the site for subscribers the testimony of Tess Stevens who married an American serviceman she met during WW2 and subsequently moved to the United States. She is also part of a video we’re making about GI Brides that will also be added to the site in the next few months.

What’s fascinating, in particular, about Tess’s story is that it doesn’t conform to the popular myth – that of a young British girl who moves to the USA and finds love and then happiness through marriage to a GI. In fact, it is a tougher story altogether, and one which shows just how remarkable and impressive a women Tess really is.

The latest research on the American impact on Britain during WW2 – and in particular the consequence for British womenfolk of so many available men arriving in Britain from 1942 onwards – shows that, if anything, the effect of this ‘friendly invasion’ has been underestimated. The fact that in Britain there were tens of thousands of illegitimate children fathered by Americans during the war tells its own story. As does the joke of the time that the Americans were ‘drinking British pubs dry, but filling up the nurseries.’

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