The World at War Read Free

basis whatever. Britain is, for better or for worse, a demilitarised society, and most of my own countrymen are unlikely to grasp the difference between a brigadier and a bombardier. We are de-historicised too. This is not the place to embark upon a tirade against the teaching of history in British schools, part of the 'commodification of education' that has betrayed so many children. Suffice it to say that there has not been a time since 1945 that school-leavers have had a poorer understanding of even the recent past. I have always believed that failure to study history properly means that the events of the past tend blithely to be forgotten or perversely misinterpreted, sadly, by politicians just as much as by school-leavers. Just as a individual's loss of memory is one of the most tragic disabling consequences of some cruel diseases, so our own loss of the collective memory furnished by history is scarcely less damaging for society as a whole.
    The World at War was first shown at the height of the Cold War in 1973–74 and the decisions made by some of the writers and producers reflected the fact that their own political views, and the prevailing attitudes on the era in which they worked, sometimes coloured their work. That is a risk with any process that involves editorial selection, and I make no claim to be immune from it myself. It is easy to deconstruct their handiwork today, for we have the opportunity to watch it repeatedly on DVD, and certainly the occasional bias was less obvious when the series was first broadcast. Research was never a simple task for producers and directors working in the early 1970s. The fact that the Cold War was at its most chilly made it difficult for the series to dig deeply in Russia, and the researchers working on those episodes dealing with the Eastern Front were unable to conduct the interviews that would have told the true and heroic story of the Russian war effort. The first-hand material that makes Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War (2005) such a triumphant success was just not available to them but some Stalinist propaganda footage did indeed make the final cut.
    Ideological bias aside – and in justice it really is confined to a few episodes in an otherwise commendably even-handed series – I still found it difficult to balance this anthology. There was a bare minimum of interviews for some topics, most notably the Eastern Front, but the wildest embarrassment of riches for others, notably the Battle of the Atlantic, D-Day in Normandy, the Pacific War and the Holocaust. The Atlantic and the Pacific wars break down quite tidily into three and two periods respectively, but the D-Day and Holocaust chapters involved me in painful editorial choices because I had to select so little from so much. Even so the Holocaust chapter is much the longest, and would have been even longer still were it not for the dreadful sameness in the details of what happens when society tips over the rim of the crater into hell. I have placed it at the half-way point of the book, immediately after the chapter on the development of area bombing. This is not to suggest any moral equivalence, for one, terrible though it was, was an act of war and the other had no conceivable military justification, but to emphasise that the signature feature of the Second World War was the literally unimaginable civilian death-toll. Our minds may not shrink from it, but they are simply unable to encompass it.
    I hope that this book will move some literally irreplaceable oral history into the written record, and so a word on methodology is appropriate. This book is based on the transcripts of interviews made for The World at War. A very pertinent lecture on visual history, given on 7 September 2003 at the Cambridge History Festival, observed that transcripts do not always conform accurately to the original tapes. The sheer physical labour and concomitant expense (the same talk estimated the cost of 'cleaning up' the transcripts