WW2 Competitions

|   1 October 2010

Ethics of bombing – and the September competition result.

Where is this?

Congratulations to Ray Mitchell of Suffolk, Paul Oliver of Norfolk and Alistair Hollington of Essex who were the first three people drawn at random from subscribers to WW2History.com who correctly identified the city in which this photo was taken as – Coventry. A signed hardback copy of Juliet Gardiner’s brilliant ‘The Blitz’ is on its way to each of you.

Coventry, in the Midlands of Britain, was subjected to a horrendous bombing raid by the Germans in November 1940. The ruins of the cathedral (on the left of the photo) have been kept as a permanent memorial to the destruction and suffering.

But, of course, it was Germany that went on, by the end of the war, to endure far more intense bombing than Britain did. Many in Britain believed (then and today) that, as the bible says, the Germans had ‘sown the wind’ and so it was right that they should subsequently ‘reap the whirlwind’.

Was it? Was it right to bomb the ancient city of Dresden in 1945 and kill 35,000 people in one night? Was it right to create the world’s first firestorm at Hamburg? Or target the medieval city of Wurzburg in part because its old wooden buildings were ‘burnable’?

Read the rest of this entry

1 Comment

WW2 Controversies

|   23 September 2010

What was the turning point of the war?

Was Stalin’s decision, made here in Moscow in October 1941, the turning point of the war?

What do you think was the turning point of WW2? One event, or one decision on which the whole conflict turned?

That was the question I asked the distinguished historians I interviewed for WW2History.com, and – you’ll not be surprised to hear – I got many different answers. But, significantly, the majority of them picked events from the Hitler/Stalin war. There does seem something of a consensus amongst historians now that this was the theatre of the war in which the fate of the whole conflict was decided – something we in Britain should remember as the Battle of Britain commemorations continue apace.

However, I didn’t agree with the majority decision of the historians I talked to – which was that the battle of Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war. In my view, by the time of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 the war was already lost for the Germans. I place the crucial moment much earlier. In fact, I believe I know the exact date on which the war – if not the whole history of the Twentieth Century – turned. It was Thursday, 16 October 1941.

Read the rest of this entry

3 Comments

WW2 Relevance

|   16 September 2010

The Barrier of Death.

Who can imagine their own death?

We’ve just been interviewing a variety of veterans for the site, and I’ve been struck again by the fundamental problem I have faced in the last 20 years of research into this subject.

Not the difficulty of convincing former Nazis to talk, or the time consuming task of checking that interviewees are actually who they say they are. Difficult as those tasks can be, they are all surmountable. But there’s a much bigger conceptual challenge that lurks behind all of this. Which is that we cannot interview the dead.

Yes, I know that’s a truism. But it represents a tremendous barrier to our understanding of the experience of war. I’ve met and interviewed, for example, survivors from the Nazi extermination centres of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. But I have never met an individual sent to any of those camps who had the ‘normal’ and ‘average’ experience – because the majority of people the Nazis sent to those camps were murdered. What that means is that we are denied a personal insight into what, in a way, is the fundamental horror the Nazis created – the last moments in the gas chamber. We also, and this worries me more, can sometimes create an impression, by interviewing survivors, that if the viewers were to be in a similar situation then they too would survive – when they almost certainly wouldn’t.

Read the rest of this entry

2 Comments

WW2 Anniversary

|   9 September 2010

THE BLITZ

Of all British cities, London suffered the most during the Blitz but how could the British endure the Blitz? Why could they ‘take it’?

I saw an amazing film this week about the Blitz – one that was made nearly 40 years ago.

It was an episode of the famous documentary series ‘The World at War’ produced by Jeremy Isaacs. It was called ‘Alone’ and was directed by David Elstein. I watched it in a newly restored format at the Imperial War Museum, and later took part in a panel discussion with Sir Jeremy, David and others to talk about the immense impact the ‘World at War’ has had on our understanding of the conflict.

Many things were remarkable about the documentary. As a filmmaker I admired the swift pacing of the programme – something which made the the work still seem very modern. (Often the older the documentary the slower and more ponderous it appears today – but most certainly not in this case). But it was as a historian that I was most entranced. Because the quality of the interviewees was breathtaking – from Sir Anthony Eden to Sir Max Aitken, a whole host of important figures from the war were represented.

However, it was the interviews with the ‘ordinary’ people of London that made the greatest impression upon me. David Elstein had the clever idea of interviewing a whole group of Eastenders in a pub, and the convivial setting contributed hugely to the relaxed way in which people talked. One thing was clear. These people were not prepared to be beaten by the German bombers. They were the living embodiment of the famous phrase ‘Britain can take it!’  But why, I wondered? Why could Britain take it in 1940?

Read the rest of this entry

2 Comments

WW2 People

|   2 September 2010

SOULS OF THE JAPANESE

The Yasukini Shrine in Tokyo

We’ve just added onto the site, for subscribers, the testimony of Kenichiro Oonuki who trained as a Kamikaze pilot during the Second World War.

He was alive in 2000, when I met him, because in April 1945 his plane developed technical faults en route to the Allied fleet off Okinawa. As a result he made an emergency landing on a nearby Japanese island, was picked up by soldiers of the Imperial Army and then taken back to Tokyo where he was punished for not successfully killing himself by smashing his plane into an enemy warship.

Oonuki’s tetsimony is hugely significant because it gives the lie to the notion that the Kamikazes were all ‘volunteers’ who killed themselves purely out of love for their country. In fact, Oonuki and his comrades were pressurized to become Kamikazes. They knew that if they didn’t come forward then their families would suffer, and they might be sent to another dangerous part of the frontline and be killed anyway.

Read the rest of this entry

Comments Off on SOULS OF THE JAPANESE

WW2 Competitions

|   1 September 2010

COMPETITION RESULT – AUGUST

This was the question posed to subscribers in the August WW2History.com competition:

‘Which leading figure in the Soviet Union, someone who facilitated Stalin’s desire to commit countless atrocities in WW2 – like the Katyn massacre and the deportation of whole nations such as the Crimean Tatars and the Kalmyks – was also a football fanatic? In fact, this man was so obsessed with his beloved Dynamo Moscow that he had one of the leading stars of their rivals, Spartak Moscow, transported to the Gulag.’

The answer was Lavrenti Beria, head of the notorious NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Beria had three intense interests in life – torture, rape and football. When he was a young secret policeman in his native Georgia he played for the local football team and was remembered as a ‘crude, dirty left half’.

Congratulations to the three winners this month: Mr Brennan of Chesterfield, Mr Robillard of the USA and Mr Jackson of Brighton. A signed copy of Catrine Clay’s terrific book on Bert Trautman, the Manchester City goalkeeper and former member of the Hitler Youth, is on its way to you.

A new competition is now available to subscribers in the Members’ Zone of the site. The prize this month, for each of the 3 lucky winners drawn at random from correct entries, is a signed copy of Juliet Gardiner’s ‘The Blitz’ – the book which is also the WW2History.com book of the month for September.

Comments Off on COMPETITION RESULT – AUGUST

WW2 Relevance

|   26 August 2010

Reacting to History

As I suspected it would, the reaction of the popular press this summer to the anniversary of the Battle of Britain has been jingo-istic to the point, occasionally, of parody. This, as I wrote earlier on this blog (and also in the September edition of BBC History magazine), has not necessarily been helpful to an understanding of the real significance of the Battle of Britain in the history of WW2.

But it is a natural reaction. Everyone is proud of the ‘good’ bits of their own history – even sometimes to the point of omitting anything inconvenient that doesn’t fit the myth.

This is part of a broader problem that we often ignore. Indeed, I have had a great deal of personal experience over the last twenty years of how people can operate different standards of judgment depending on what they were predisposed to think about a particular historical subject. Let me give you an example. In 1991 I wrote and produced a film which looked at what I believe was a ‘British’ war crime committed in Austria during WW2. It was called ‘a British Betrayal’, and examined the handover by the British army of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to Stalin and Tito in 1945. Many of these prisoners then suffered appallingly – a number were tortured and killed. And the British Army give up these prisoners illegally – acting against Allied policy. I still think this was scandalous.

Read the rest of this entry

1 Comment

WW2 Relevance

|   19 August 2010

No First World War – No Second World War

The WWI cemetery at Verdun.

Newspapers here in Britain are full of articles about 1940 and the various 70th anniversaries that fall this year. But what almost no one seems to emphasise is how the Second World War – including the key events of 1940 – existed in the shadow of the First World War. The anxieties of the German General Staff, for instance, just before the invasion of France in 1940 were largely the result of fear of a repeat of the trench warfare in Flanders.

Indeed, one of the most important insights I gained from meeting many former Nazis over the last twenty years is that it’s almost impossible to over-exaggerate the importance the First World War played in shaping the Second. Not just in the obvious way – the defeat of Germany and the perceived injustice of the Treaty of Versailles – but in an emotional, visceral way.

Read the rest of this entry

Comments Off on No First World War – No Second World War

WW2 Anniversary

|   12 August 2010

Remembering Hiroshima

Hiroshima today – with the memorial dome on the left of the photo.

It was the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August, and I have just returned from a troubling visit to the city.

Here’s why it was troubling. The focus of the commemoration was on the terrible suffering of the people of Hiroshima as a result of the attack – and that, I guess, is as it should be. But the whole atmosphere of the event – not to say the tone and layout of the hugely popular museum in the ‘Peace Park’ close to the epicentre of the explosion – was utterly condemnatory. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is not exactly described as ‘a war crime’ in the official Japanese literature, but a visit to the Hiroshima museum certainly gave me the impression that this was what the Japanese authorities want people to think it was. This sense that the Japanese were ultimately ‘victims’ of the war was something which a Japanese academic explicitly expressed to me some years ago. ‘There were two horrendous crimes of WW2,’ he said. ‘The Holocaust and Hiroshima’.

Really? Is that how we should remember Hiroshima?

Read the rest of this entry

2 Comments

WW2 Anniversary

|   5 August 2010

Battle of Britain


Did Churchill ‘hype’ the danger of a German invasion in 1940?

We’ve just released onto the site for subscribers our video on the Battle of Britain.

It was a fascinating video to make because of the divide on this subject that I detected between many academic historians and the popular myth. The prevailing view in popular culture is clear: the victory of the RAF in the Battle of Britain saved this country from invasion. But to many experts the history is not quite as simple as that.

Take the views of Professor Adam Tooze, for example, now a Professor at Yale University but for many years an academic at Cambridge University. In answer to my question ‘Was there ever any real prospect of the Germans invading Britain in 1940?’ He answered: ‘No’. And then elaborated: ‘I do think one has to understand the timeframes here. They [ie the Germans] hadn’t started thinking about a war with Britain, let alone an invasion, until May 1938. The naval armaments programme doesn’t get into gear until January 1939. For the preceding five years Britain had been outspending Germany on the navy so the already enormous gap between the German navy and the British navy in 1933 had not been shrinking but growing larger every year. So when they then also go on to lose the vast majority of their modern naval forces in the Norwegian debacle which, from a German naval point of view, is a catastrophe, they essentially do not have a surface navy with which to protect an invasion in the summer of 1940. I believe they had three cruisers and four destroyers. Two of the cruisers are light cruisers, and so the preponderance of the home fleet is absolute, which basically makes any invasion attempt a huge gamble, because if the British decide to launch a suicidal charge through the Channel they can cut the supply lines and isolate the German army and that will be the end of that.’

Professor Tooze goes so far as to agree that it is ‘fair to say’ that Churchill was to some extent ‘hyping’ up the chances of a German invasion during this period.

Or listen to what the historian Andrew Roberts, author of the acclaimed history of WW2 ‘Storm of War’ told me: ‘I don’t think the Germans were going to be able to invade successfully in 1940. I think that the actual plans needed to get an army across the channel, even in the event that the RAF was neutralised for a long enough period, were just not in place. There weren’t enough of those flat bottom boats, they weren’t particularly sea worthy and if the Royal Navy had got amongst them there would have been a massacre.’

All of which begs the question, why is this reality not properly reflected in the massive coverage this summer of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain? Or do we know the answer already – that myth is more comforting than history?

Comments Off on Battle of Britain
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »