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’ […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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? […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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