historiography

historiography. The movement of the war from memory into history is still far from complete. Many participants still survive, and help to keep the memory green. There is also a legacy of film and sound archive, which combines with the impact of feature films and documentaries on popular understanding to ensure that the perception of historical writings about the years 1939–45, and the audience for this history, are shaped by nonacademic influences to an unusual degree for any historical subject. Since this war was even more ‘total’ than the First World War, with an unparalleled mobilization of women and non-combatant men for war work, the range and types of sub-histories which it has stimulated are broader than for any previous conflict.

Moreover, it was a war where secrecy abounded. As these secrets are revealed, with the slow passage of time and the relaxation of rules about what must never be spoken of at all, the dimensions of war history expand, so that more and more aspects of the struggle call for serious coverage.

This they often do not at first receive. In the affluent western world, commercial pressures have encouraged the diversification of historical and pseudo-historical writing about the war. There is not only a buoyant market for memoirs and anecdotal accounts of everyday wartime life, either in the armed forces or on the home fronts, but also a keen public appetite for sensation, readily filled by accounts of derring-do, some of them much more accurate than others. The continued closure of wartime files, maintained because of bureaucratic ineptitude or from genuine concern that a nation's security might be endangered if too much became public too soon, or from delicacy about revealing intimate details of wartime private lives, has had an unanticipated result: it has promoted a flourishing industry of speculation and distortion. Several world best-sellers on supposed secret service affairs are historically beneath contempt. The line between fact and fiction has become so hard to draw that a new use has been found for the word ‘faction’, to describe the conflation of the two.

Moreover, in recent decades many professional academic historians have moved away from the traditional concentration on diplomatic, political, and military history towards a greater interest in exploring the history of everyday life. Some of their academic studies have embraced parts of German-occupied eastern Europe where, until recently, political pressures discouraged realistic accounts of life under Nazi rule.

Wartime emotions and enmities have still not entirely waned. Even those born since 1945 are shaped by the war's impact on their relatives. It is not only in the UK that faces and symbols from the war remain living images in popular culture, often evoked and instantly recognizable.

A main difficulty for the historian is the work of sensationalists, who get hold of part—often only a small part—of some astonishing exploit, write it up in a best-seller, and leave the reading world with a distorted view of what actually happened. Let one instance suffice.

More than 20,000 British and American participants knew something, from their own war work, about the successes the Allies had with decipher during the war (see MAGIC and ULTRA); for nearly 30 years, not one of them spoke out in public. In 1967 a French journalist, Michel Garder, devoted a section of his La Guerre Secrète des Services Speciaux Français 1935–1945 to the French end of the ULTRA story, although without actually naming the ENIGMA machine cipher. Bertrand, head during the war of French decipher and by 1967 a retired general, was so furious at what he thought were Garder's inaccuracies that he persuaded the French security authorities to let him put out a correct version which was published in Paris early in 1973. In it even he nodded: he swallowed whole the Polish cover story for the Poles' advances into ENIGMA, without realizing what they had not cared to tell him. When Bertrand's book appeared, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, who had helped organize the distribution of ULTRA material round the British High Command, persuaded the British authorities in turn that he might now be allowed a word, and published The Ultra Secret in 1974. This made an immediate newspaper and television sensation, parts of which echo to this day (see Coventry). Not until 1978 did Ronald Lewin's Ultra goes to war get the facts more or less right; and not till 1988 did the second part of the third volume of Sir Harry Hinsley's magisterial official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War put the available record quite straight.

Since the natural trend of all historical scholarship is revisionist, there has been a steady divergence between what academic historians have studied, argued, and written about controversial issues and the popular conclusions long since established. Most of these conclusions were determined by the impact of wartime propaganda and, in the defeated states, by reaction against it (often under the influence of Allied re-education campaigns). The first wave of writing about the war took the form of journalistic accounts, and of memoirs by participants; of these last the flow goes on.

Only Churchill, de Gaulle, and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880–1962), of the warring heads of governments, left substantial memoirs of the war years. As a fluent non-academic historian, Churchill, naturally enough, sought to set his own account of his struggles from the anti-appeasement stage to victory in the form of a history of the whole war, not merely as the memoirs of one of its protagonists. The six volumes of his The Second World War appeared from 1948 to 1954, and apart from their historical value, which remains larger than some of his critics allow, at first served as a political tool to re-establish the reputation that had been diminished by his electoral defeat in 1945. De Gaulle, too, used his Mémoires de Guerre (3 vols., Paris, 1954–9) as a weapon in the post-war politics of France. Queen Wilhelmina's Eenzaam maar neet alleen (The Hague, 1959, translated in London the following year as Lonely but not alone) was slighter, though interesting.

Apart from Goebbels and Ciano, who kept copious if self-serving diaries, no other leading political figures on either side left any substantial literary legacy. ( Molotov's posthumously published memoirs reiterate his well-known public stance—of 1945, of course, not of 1940.) Despite recurrent efforts to forge diaries by Mussolini (who did actually keep one, but it has never been found) or Hitler, neither they nor Stalin left any account either of their diplomacy or of their strategy. The post-war publication of official correspondence between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin gives many insights into their relationship, the extent to which they co-operated, and the origins of post-war tensions.

As is usual with military memoirs, most are written by the victors: execution, suicide, or death in action removed most of the key Axis commanders (e.g. Rommel and Yamamoto) before they could go on record for posterity. Memoirs of statesmen and generals have been accompanied by recollections by the lower ranks, and followed by oral history undertaken by younger historians (many of whom forget how important a source oral history was to Thucydides, the greatest master of the trade). Much recent work is damaging to the reputations of wartime heroes, and is more concerned with personal foibles than with strategic acumen, or lack of it.

Official histories, some inordinately long and some inordinately dull, but a few of fascinating interest, have been produced in quantity, particularly by the British and the Americans. The British histories now cover grand strategy, in six volumes edited by Sir James Butler (1956–76); all the main land campaigns; the war at sea; the war in the air; the intelligence front; and, in several volumes, the home front. Sir Michael Howard's volume on Strategic Deception ( 1990) and W. K. Hancock and Margaret Gowing's British War Economy ( 1949) are perhaps the most notable.

S. E. Morison published a fifteen-volume History of United States naval operations in World War II (Boston, Mass., 1947–62) and followed them up with a single-volume summary, The two-ocean war ( 1963). W. R. Craven and J. L. Cate dealt in seven volumes with the history of the USAAF (Chicago 1948–58). Forrest C. Pogue, the biographer of Marshall, has supervised several valuable histories of land campaigns.

Some of the most striking American books about the war have dealt with tactics rather than strategy, such as Charles B. Macdonald's Company Commander ( 1947) or Stephen E. Ambrose's Pegasus Bridge ( 1984). Mention must also be made of a few books of direct recollection which can still make the reader's hair rise on the back of the scalp: George Millar, Horned Pigeon ( 1947) and Maquis ( 1945), F. Spencer Chapman, The Jungle is Neutral ( 1949), Peter Kemp, No Colours or Crest ( 1958), R. V. Jones, Most Secret War ( 1978), and Sándor Radó, Codename Dora ( 1977). Similarly, Terence O'Brien's trilogy Chasing after Danger ( 1990), Out of the Blue ( 1984), and The Moonlight war ( 1987) gives a more vivid account of what the air war felt like to a pilot than is to be found in many official memoranda.

Soviet and eastern bloc historians have had to write under very different conditions from their western counterparts. In the USSR particularly, accounts of the war soon had to be expressed in almost mythical form: the defeat of Nazi aggression and the sufferings inflicted on the Soviet people by the Germans became the Great Patriotic Struggle which legitimized the regime more than anything else in its history. Embarrassment about the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939 prevented any serious diplomatic history of the origins of the war from appearing in the USSR. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only a few titbits of information appeared; up to its demise no serious history of that period had been attempted (or permitted?). The biography of Stalin by Dmitri Volkogonov, published in 1991, adds many new details about its subject's life, but it contributed little to the study of his role in the strategy of the Soviet armed forces or the diplomacy of international relations that was not already published in the West.

In Yugoslavia, and still more in Albania, the war represented the legitimizing spirit of the post-war regime. As in the USSR, official historians have been torn between emphasizing the heroism of communist partisans, fighting not only the foreign invader but also local anti-communist forces, and wishing to play down the divisions among the people during the war. Whereas in France, for instance, the study of collaboration and resistance, and the many shades of both, has become a major historical industry, in Yugoslavia the bitterness of the internecine fighting still marks the study of the problem, and plays its part in the country's difficult present. Milovan Djilas's wartime memoirs still ring with the ferocious certainties of civil war, despite all his later loss of faith in communism.

The perception of the Second World War as a European civil war, lucidly illustrated in John Lukacs's The Last European War: September 1939/December 1941 ( 1976), gave rise to two major public historical disputes in the 1980s.

In the UK, Nikolai Tolstoy campaigned to publicize the forced repatriations of Soviet citizens (see Soviet exiles at war), Yugoslavs, and others by the British occupation authorities in Germany and Austria at the end of the war. Many other historians took up the question, without getting involved (as Tolstoy did) in legal battles.

In Germany, the West Berlin historian Ernst Nolte published in 1986 a 700-page study, The European Civil War, in which he argued that the Second World War should be seen as an ideological civil war which was the culmination of the impact of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. fascism should be seen as a counter-revolution, with Hitler, particularly, bent on destroying the Marxist–Leninist USSR, but also having learned from Stalin's terroristic methods. Some historians objected to Nolte's comparisons between Nazis and communists, feeling that this reduced in significance Hitler's Final Solution against European Jewry. Others thought Nolte's argument too narrowly focused on Germany and the USSR: after all, had not the west European states, the USA and Japan all had a major role to play in the origins and nature of the war? Nolte's work was typical of a recent trend among historians towards re-emphasizing ideological issues in the study of the war, after a period when economic and other allegedly ‘real’ issues had predominated. Debates about the morality of individual allied operations, such as the bombing of Dresden ( 13 February 1945) or the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Japan, are similarly at the borderline between history and moral philosophy.

Civilians in the war have been the subject of much recent study in the West. Of course, there was a very great difference between the conditions of life for civilians in occupied and in unoccupied Europe. Popular historians have studied the impact of war, rationing, and other restrictions on the private lives of men and women from 1939 to 1945. Despite the obvious divergences in regime, the conclusion seems to be that both in the UK and in Germany, for instance, the effect of the war was to loosen traditional moral constraints, especially about extra-marital sex. Studies of popular entertainment in Germany and the UK also indicate how far the same transatlantic influences made themselves felt on the dance floor. Some historians have seen the origins of post-war problems, such as juvenile delinquency, in the wartime years when fathers at the front could no longer play their traditional disciplinary role (foreshadowing the spread of divorce and of single-parent families in the West).

Of general histories of the war there are now many, which vary greatly in size and in quality. The best is Total War by Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard. In the second edition, published in 1989 and now called Penguin History of the Second World War (London, 1999), Calvocoressi was able to state that he had been an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during the war, and to incorporate directly into his text some of the insights into the war's conduct that he had picked up from having been privy to ULTRA traffic at the time.

The continuing boom in all manner of publications about the war shows no signs of abating. The study of historical writings about it has now itself become a specialized field; there is plenty of room for criticism of previous historians' efforts. The collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the new techniques of oral and popular history, offer the chance for yet more fresh materials to come to light; while irresolvable debates on decades-old controversies will no doubt continue.

Mark Almond/ and M. R. D. Foot