The World at War Read Free Page A

of Sir Jeremy Isaacs's Cold War series to be £250,000) meant that I worked from the written record, using taped interviews only when there was an unresolved problem with sense. I have tried to behave responsibly with the evidence, and have not conflated different interviews by the same subject into the same piece of text. Maryam Philpott, whose skills as a researcher have been honed on some of my previous projects, had the onerous task of converting some of the typescript to computer disc, so that the material could be more easily edited. My old friend Hugh Bicheno widened the assault, and he and I then carved up the project between us. I could not have hoped to succeed without his industry, eye for detail and great good sense. There are only a few occasions when I exercised what I might call a casting vote, and the responsibility for the finished product is mine alone.
    Interviewees are given a brief description, generally on the first occasion on which they appear in a given chapter. In a few cases the original transcripts give precious little detail, omitting first names or accurate unit designations, and there is often nothing I have been able to do to remedy the deficiency. In many others, individuals were steadily promoted during and sometimes after the war. Anthony Eden was first knighted and later created Earl of Avon, while that little tiger of a general, John Harding, began the war as a lieutenant colonel and ended it as a lieutenant general, becoming a field marshal and a peer after it. I include a list of dramatis personae that will help readers trace the careers of the most significant interviewees, and throughout I have tried (not, I fear, with complete success) to give individuals the rank or appointment they held at the time to which the quotation refers. I have translated foreign ranks, where possible, into the nearest British equivalent. Purists will rightly object to 'SS Colonel' rather than 'SS-Standartenführer', and will observe that a German Leutnant often enjoyed responsibilities denied to a British second lieutenant, but it is the stories that these individuals tell that matter to us, not the braid that they wore. It is a sad reflection that I know least about those interviewees who often felt the sharpest edge of war – like those Americans who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
    My abiding memory of a project that has claimed the best part of a year of my working life is of the sheer scale of The World, at War and its triumphant and enduring success. I doubt if we shall ever see something of this epic dimension carried off with such panache again. In my lifetime television may have gained much in terms of technology, but it has lost at least as much in terms of scale, vision and courage. In a small way this series changed the way that I personally looked at history, and in a broader sense it changed television's relationship with the past. These transcripts, lying in the dusty darkness for half my lifetime, have something fresh to say about this war that shaped the world in which I grew up, and whose long shadow is, even now, only beginning to recede.

INTERVIEWEES
    Aitken, Sir John 'Max' (1910–85), wartime RAF fighter ace, son and heir of Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express. He became a Conservative MP, and disclaimed his father's barony as soon as he inherited it.
    Alex, Private George, 101st US Airborne Division, Normandy.
    Ambrose, Professor Stephen (1936–2002), influential and prolific American historian, author, among other works, of Band of Brothers.
    Antonov, General Alexei (1896–1962), wartime Soviet Staff Officer, Red Army Chief of Staff 1945–46, Chief of Staff to Warsaw Pact Forces 1955–62.
    Aviel, Avraham, survived the Radun ghetto massacre in Poland, witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
    Axtell, Marine C S, marine at Iwo Jima.
    Ball, George (1909–94), wartime lawyer for the Lend-Lease programme and Director of the US Strategic Bombing Survey.