Dan Snow's History Hit - How should we remember WW2?

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

The question of wars and how we remember them has always fascinated me. With WW1 we seem to remember the enormous, tragic loss of life - captured so beautifully by the likes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But WW2 seems to be more about stoicism, Spitfires and speeches. Lucy Noakes came on the podcast to discuss how our collective memory of WW2 and Churchill has changed through films, political campaigns, historians and present day agendas. We also chatted about what exactly we could learn from the 1940s, and how to apply those lessons to the challenges of today's world. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. We have got our BEST EVER offer available at the moment. If you use the code 'VEDay' on sign up, you get 30 days free, then your first five months access will be just £1/€1/$1 - it's £5.99 a month after. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This week is the 75th anniversary since the announcement that Germany had unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in Europe. It was the end of the Second World War in Europe, the most destructive war that Europe had ever seen. Genocide, brutality, barbarism, violence and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Millions and millions of people murdered, killed, wounded and brutalised. We talk about the Second World War a lot on this podcast, but I thought it was time now to just

pause and reflect on how we remember that war, how it is remembered. Who shapes that memory? Is it politicians? Is it us? Is it film directors? Is it historians? The obvious person to talk to was Professor Lucy Noakes. She's Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex. And she spends all her time thinking about the way that war is remembered, commemorated. And its memory is used in our contemporary discourse, in our contemporary politics and conversations that we have with each other. It was a fascinating discussion. Tomorrow we've got another podcast,

more specifically on V-Day itself, where you're going to be hearing from a veteran, we're going to be hearing from a writer who has interviewed numerous veterans on kind of what the feeling was on some of the anecdotal histories and stories of that remarkable day. But first, let me tell you about the special deal

that we've got going on on History Hit TV at the moment. If you go to History Hit TV, you will get access to hundreds of hours of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast. There's about 400 on there that are exclusive. They're not available anywhere else. We're running live podcasts on Zoom, so you can take part. We've got weekly quizzes and prizes and subscriber-only articles as well. It's the ultimate history package. We only use this one for big historical anniversaries. We're going to be offering 30 days free and then the first five months for just one pound, euro or dollar. You can go on there and subscribe to History Hit. All you've got to do is use the code VEDAY, V-E-D-A-Y, when you sign up. You're basically not going to pay much for the first six months. It's

a crazy offer and we give it out every big historical anniversary. So go and take advantage of it. It's 5.99 after that, but first month it's free and then it's one pound euro dollar for the first five months. So go and check that out. In the meantime, here is Lucy Noakes. Enjoy. here is Lucy Noakes. Enjoy. Well, Lucy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast in this 75th anniversary week of VE Day. You've spent your whole career working out how we remember the war. I presume the last few weeks and months, in fact, the last couple of years, has been a fertile time for you. Yes, it has. It's been much too fertile, in fact. I mean, I guess I'd probably date it, the presence of the war,

not in popular culture, but certainly kind of social media culture, started to go kind of stratospheric from about 2015. You could already see that it was going to happen, I think, from earlier, from around 2013, with all the debates about the meaning of the First World War, just before the First World War centenary. So if you like, the stage was already set for people to be kind of mobilising and then arguing about the meanings of the Second World War, as we moved into firstly, you know, the debates about Brexit, both before and during and after the referendum in 2016. And then, obviously, more recently, the war's been hyper-present in so many of the discussions about COVID-19 and the current pandemic crisis that we're living through.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, it's quite strange that we actually go back to a war as our point of reference for a pandemic rather than previous pandemics. Is the Second World War, can it ever be useful as a way of thinking about the present? Or should it stay in the past? Whether it's useful or not, in a way, it doesn't matter if it's useful or not, because we always reimagine the past. At the moment, since the war itself, we've been reimagining the Second World War in ways that are useful to us in that particular present. So the way that we remember or imagine or recall the war changes according to the times that we're living through and to what kind of uses that you can put it to. I think what you've seen more recently, you have seen a kind of a

renewed attempt to claim the war as their own by particular groups in British society, I think in 2015, 2016. And until very recently, what you saw were often, I would say, quite problematic attempts to claim a particular memory of the war by those kind of on the right of British politics, particularly not all by any means, but some of the people that supported Brexit, the ones who like to call themselves Brexiteers. So people like Aaron Banks was, you know, happily tweeting away images of Angela Merkel that were positioned to make her look like she was giving a fascist salute as a way of kind of saying, oh, this is why we defeated totalitarianism and Germany's supposedly kind of natural instincts towards this in 1945, we can do it again. So I think what you've seen really,

really clearly in the last few years is the way that memory is not the same as history. And the way that memory appears and is used is much more related to the needs or the perceived needs of the present. With the First World War, there's this really huge kind of historiographical swirl that seems to go on from sort of jingoistic remembrance and celebration in the early 20s to war poets and depression and the slide towards war in 1930, and then blaming the generals and class antagonism, and then arguably a bit of revisionism now, people saying the generals weren't too bad. Do we see that same process in remembering the Second World War?

Do you have those strong historiographical surges with the Second World War, or is it more disparate? I don't think it's as clear-cut with the Second World War, is it more disparate? I don't think it's as clear cut with the Second World War possibly because we haven't had quite so long to be kind of reifying it in that same way but I think what you can see very broadly okay very broadly with the Second World War you see the beginnings of the memory or the myth if you like the Second World War being created in the war itself. You see in the immediate five years or so of the aftermath of the war, there's really not very much representation. People have kind of had enough.

They want to move on and think about new things, even though they are still living with rationing and austerity. It's in the 1950s that you start to see the war being reimagined in novels, but particularly in Britain in the war films of the 1950s. And some colleagues have argued that what you see in those films is a move away from the image or myth of the war that's really formed in 1940, which is around the idea of the People's War, which is a broadly kind of socially liberal left-wing image of the British people at war. And in the 1950s you start to see far more of a focus on the military rather than civilians and particularly on men in the

military and particularly upper class kind of the officer class men in the 1950s and you can argue that some of that maybe some of the films in the late 1950s perhaps are kind of serving a need to perhaps a kind of serving a need to remind people of past greatness in the age of the beginnings of decolonisation and also, of course, of Suez in 1956. It comes for all kinds of other reasons outside of the Memories War. Hollywood kind of takes over in the 1960s. And then the next time you see the Second World War being remembered on any kind of large scale, I guess, in Britain, it's in the 1980s, where you get another wave of perhaps more critical films and television programmes about the war.

But it's also been taken up by Margaret Thatcher's government, the idea of Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady, kind of a reimagining of Churchill. And you see that in all kinds of places. And you get a much more kind of Churchillian myth circulating then. What I'd say kind of very broadly certainly over the second half of the 20th century what you saw in terms of a shifting memory of the Second World War is a move away from the idea of the People's War which is created in the war and particularly created in 1940, that starts to crumble. It starts to be perhaps kind of undermined in the 1950s, but it holds true. It has a kind of popular purchase until the late 1970s, early 1980s. And I don't think that it's a coincidence that that starts to be kind of replaced by a more Churchillian myth, and maybe a more kind of right-wing myth

and memory of the Second World War as political consensus starts to kind of crumble at that point as well. So you think with Reagan and Thatcher and the crumbling of this centre-left consensus of those post-war decades, you think politicians start to cherry-pick the bits of the war that suited their current struggles? I think politicians probably always cherry picked not just bits of the war, but bits of the past that suit them. But I think what you saw in the 1980s was particularly around the Falklands War in 1982, you saw a reclaiming, not just of Margaret Thatcher kind of putting on Churchill's mantle. But if you go back and you look at the 1982, for example, the emergency

Saturday sitting of the House of Commons, we've only had one of those since, which is around Brexit. But if you look at that, and if you look at Labour politicians like Michael Foote, and Michael Foote was one of the authors of, you know, The Guilty Men, just at the start of the Second World War, criticising appeasement, criticising Chamberlain. 1982, Michael Foote is there saying, this is like liberating small nations in the Second World War. We need to liberate the Falklands because that's what we do. That's what we did in the Second World War. We need to do it again now. So it's not just the Conservative Party and Thatcher becoming Churchill that were doing that. It was a much more widespread kind of sense of liberating small nations

is what Britain does. And you saw it all over, not just in Parliament, but also in the press as well. I'm very interested in what further evolutions we'll go through. I mean, I wonder if in 200 years' time we will think of the First World War as less bad than we think it is now, and we'll think of the Second War as less good than it is now. You know, will those two wars simply bolt on to those gigantic coalition wars from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries as hugely destructive, awful events

caused by a set of political circumstances that people have hoped to evolve beyond? Where are your senses telling you that our Second World War remembrance is going and perhaps our Churchill remembrance as well? Quite a few historians have argued over the last few years that as we move further away in time from the First and Second World Wars, we will perhaps tend to see them as one kind of longer war with a break with an interregnum in the middle, a bit like the 30 Years War or even 100 Years War. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I think that what's different about the way that we will remember these is that we have compared to, say, our memories or our knowledge of, say, even the Napoleonic Wars or the Crimean War or the Bull War we've got far more material and we've got far more material these were literate populations that were at war who wrote about it themselves

and who certainly in the case of the Second World War have written about it since and have had their memories kind of captured in all kinds of different places, like the BBC People's War website, for example. I mean, how we'll remember them, I don't know. They may well be replaced by something else in the meantime if we're looking 200 years into the future. They may seem like very kind of small fry a long time ago. I think that how we will remember them will depend on what use they could be put to at the time. And I think historians in 200

years time will probably still be arguing about them and will still be arguing about the way that they're used as a metaphor for things to tell people about themselves in the present. Your successors will be very busy. And what about Churchill himself? It feels like we've got in the wider public, British and Americans, Churchill is a revered figure. But then you get this fascinating clash between Twitter and the public, if you like, when somebody comes out and says, well, as Churchill said, never surrender. And then Twitter melts down.

And it feels like at the moment, either those battle lines will be drawn, they will harden, or will popular opinion sort of follow, is it elite opinion? I don't know. But which is that Churchill was a sort of racist imperial warlord? What are your senses about that? Well, he's become a metaphor for, if you like, both sides of the kind of culture wars that are going on about history and particularly about the Second World War at the moment. So, yeah, you're quite right. If somebody says Churchill on Twitter, both sides of those arguments are going to immediately gear up. But of course, he can be both. He was a committed imperialist. He's certainly his views on race, they're not things that we feel very comfortable with today, I hope most of us. But at the same time as that, he was an extraordinary speechmaker, extraordinary orator, and he was certainly for 1940 to 1944, he was the right person to be in charge at that point.

Because as I think we can probably empathise with at the moment, one of the things that you want when you're going through a crisis is you want your morale boosted occasionally. And today that might be going outside on a Thursday night to clap for carers. Particularly in 1940, it was perhaps Churchill speeches and also, I'd say, Priestley on the radio. So I think he can be both. And that's one of the frustrations for historians is that this stuff gets kind of reified and simplified. And he's either this or he's either that. And I think what most historians would want to do all the time, which really annoys our colleagues, is to go, it's a bit more complicated. Well, listen, this is a big question that's just occurred to me. Who's most responsible for shaping our memory of the past? Is it historians, politicians, filmmakers, or a and other? It's not historians. I really don't

think it's historians. I think that there's a range of different groups who get to have a say. So yeah, politicians are quite important. But then again, politicians mobilising Churchill or Attlee or the Blitz spirit or the Dunkirk spirit or any of the other things that they do try to mobilise, that would have no resonance at all if people didn't already have a sense of what these things meant, even if they don't agree with what that is. So yeah, filmmakers are really important. But I would also say that we need to remember other organisations, so civic organisations like the British Legion.

I think they actually have a pretty big say in this. And then it's also, it feeds into the kinds of memories and the stories that circulate in families, because the stories that we are told and that we tell are both shaped by the kind of popular representations and the dominant memory of the war. But at the same time, they kind of feed into it, a kind of symbiotic relationship. So I don't see it as being a kind of a triangle with like politicians or the press or a filmmaker at the top, I would see it more as a memory circuit or a kind of circle where there's a range of different people putting ideas and memories in and those get picked up or not. You've done so much work on bereavement in the Second World War. I'm always astonished. I've made a couple of programmes for the end of the war for the BBC and no one's that bothered

about death toll. It's not what you talk about. But you know, the First World War is all anyone talks about. The Second World War, which had around half the British casualties of the First World War, all anyone wants to talk about is various other things, like heroism and justice of the cause or Churchill speeches. And yet I talked to my grandmother and various individual veterans, and those losses fell extremely unequally. And if you were in the wrong place, in the wrong family, in the wrong community, you could lose dozens of friends, as one might have done in the First World War as well.

Weirdly, the First World War is how I ended up writing a book on death and grief and mourning in the Second World War, because I've been working on the First World War centenary for the last few years. And it just really hit me one day that we remember the First World War almost entirely in terms of deaths. I did a lot of talks to kind of public history groups and public lectures during the centenary. And sort of 60 to 80 percent of the men that fought in the First World War died. They don't believe you when you say, well, it's a tenth of that. It's far, far less. That's almost all that we remember about the First World War.

And it is so marginal to how we think of the Second World War. You're quite right. And I think that's really interesting. And I think it's something that's being kind of squeezed out by the idea of things like Churchill and the Dunkirk spirit and Blitz spirit, this idea of people kind of stoically coming together and carrying on with good humour. There's not a lot of room in there, is there,

for the dead and even the missing of the war? Has that always been there? And was it something difficult for families that lost in the Second World War? Was there less sympathy? I think that what I called the kind of the emotional economy of mid-20th century Britain was an emotional economy that actually worked really well in terms of overall morale in the war, because what people had learned to do in the First World War, and then even more, this had been reinforced through magazines, through self-help groups, through kinds of places in the 1920s, and particularly in the 1930s, is to be stoical, is to manage your emotions. It's not to deny your emotions, but it's to manage them. And if these emotions are kind of difficult or unattractive or likely to upset other people, to keep these to yourself.

So as Britain goes into the war, it's a nation that with variations of region and class and gender has been taught to inhabit the stiff upper lip idea of how you act. So that means that when people are bereaved, they don't talk about it very much in public. In some ways, it's kind of great for morale that you haven't got people running around tearing their hair out and sobbing and falling apart on the streets because they've been bereaved. But on the other hand, it's not necessarily very good for those people. and I've been thinking about this with the anniversary of VE Day coming up, is that lots of people feel, while there are people out partying and celebrating, there are lots of people who just feel like, well, my life is over. I lost the person or the people that I love, or I don't know where they are. They're still missing. I'm not able to celebrate. I don't feel part of this. And there's very little audience for that. People don't really want to hear it. People tend to very much kind of keep that to themselves.

They might write it in letters. They might write it in a diary. A very few people write it in autobiographies, but it's something that's really not spoken about very much. And I think that's really difficult for a lot of people. Let me put you on the spot. What do you think we should remember and think about in terms of the Second World War today?

I'll go back to what I said before about what we remember about wars is determined very much by the period that we're living through. So what I've been thinking recently is, given what we're living through at the moment, and given there's been a lot of talk about what kind of society will we either emerge into or build at the moment. And given there's been a lot of talk about what kind of society will we either emerge into or build at the end of this. So I've been thinking a lot about the ways that crises either speed up or bring about social, economic, political change. And you certainly

see this in the Second World War and at the end of the Second World War for Britain, what Britain does in 1945, first thing it does is they have a general election and Churchill, huge popularity ratings at VE days, something like 83% think he's wonderful. But come June and July, he's out. And people have elected a much quieter, less charismatic Clement Attlee's Labour government to push through the changes that people have been thinking about and working towards, really almost from the start of the war. So the idea of the People's War focuses around the idea of what's called building a new Jerusalem. So the ideas that become articulated in the Beveridge Report of 1942,

of a we're fighting for all these things overseas, but we are fighting for something new at home as well. So I guess I'd like us to be remembering that at the moment and thinking that crises are also opportunities, but you have to plan for those opportunities. You have to plan for what kind of society you want to come out of the crisis. So I'd like us to maybe be thinking a bit about 1942 and what ideas were circulating then, what people were thinking they wanted to get from the sacrifices they were making then. Yeah, that's such a good point. I mean,

one thing that I think about a lot with the climate crisis is the big lessons from just engineering of the 20th century is if you want to achieve something that's seemingly physically possible, but seemingly out of reach at the moment, by applying an unlimited amount of political will and money to it, you can have a nuclear bomb, you can have jet technology. And then later in the century, it's like you can have someone land on the moon. And we're seeing that now with the vaccine or whatever it is, it can be inspiring, or it can be depressing, depending on the point of view that we can achieve so much, we put our mind to it. Yeah, absolutely. That's what we should be thinking about now, as well as thinking about things like a vaccine or other kind of medical cures or things to alleviate COVID-19. We also need to be thinking about what kind of world we want to emerge into when we finally come out of this, whenever that is. It's an opportunity to an extent to kind of pause and think about it. Well, it's an opportunity for educators too. And I hope that everyone enrolls in Essex University to get more of the British Academy that's just come out, which thinks about emotional histories of war.

And that is called Total War, an emotional history. And that's edited with the wonderful Claire Langhammer and Claudia Sebrecht, who are both at the University of Sussex. Fantastic. Lucy Notes, thank you very much for coming on the podcast on this special week. Thank you very much Dan I hope you just before you go a bit of a favour to ask I totally understand if you don't want to

become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favour it's for free go to iTunes or wherever you get

your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very,

very grateful. Thank you.