Dan Snow's History Hit - WW2: The Great Imperial War

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Most consider the Second World War to have been fought between 1939-1945 but, as you'll hear in this podcast, Richard Overy believes that the conflict was much broader than this. The Second World War was in fact the last gasp of global imperialism with Italy, Germany and Japan all seeking to build new empires through violent military means and at a terrible cost to the world. The defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 left the world in ruins and saw the end of territorial empires and marked a new era in global power. Rochard brings a new and fascinating approach to the context of the Second World War.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got a big one for you. We've got one of the greatest living historians on the podcast now. He's Professor Richard Overy. He's a professor of history at Exeter University and he is quite literally the world's foremost expert on the Second World War, I think, fair to say. His books are essential reading for anybody interested in the greatest conflict the world's ever known. He's just written a new one called Blood and Ruins, The Great Imperial War. And importantly, he gives the dates as 1931 to 45. He makes it very clear that the fighting we think of as a buildup to the Second World War is in fact an essential part of that great clash, not just a minor precursor. Next week on the anniversary of the outbreak of

the Second World War, I'll do another one of my podcasts where I sort of monologue. I'll talk everyone through just how, when, and why the Second World War broke out. But this episode features someone who is a lot more qualified than I am. So this is kind of essential listening if you're interested in that. And hopefully I can add a bit of detail here and there. It was great to finally have Richard Overy on the podcast. It's been too long. If you wish to listen to back episodes of Dan Snow's history without too long. If you wish to listen to back episodes of Dan Snow's History without the ads, or you wish to access the world's best history channel, please become a subscriber. You go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv. There you subscribe

for the price of a, well, actually a sort of microbrewery brewed ale every month. And then you get access to the world's best history channel, all these podcasts, thousands of podcasts, and you'll never be bored again. You get to banish boredom. Pretty sweet deal. It's getting to the point now, to my greatest surprise, that I'm meeting people on the streets who are subscribers. It used to be people came up to me and said, oh, I've seen you on TV. Now they go, I'm one of your subscribers. It always takes my surprise because I can't quite believe this is real. And it also makes me feel like I should give them a hug, which I think is not really what I should do. So apologies if you ever come up to me and say that and you see a kind of flash of indecision in my eyes. That's what's going through

my head. Please head over to historyhit.tv, join that revolution and get subscribing. In the meantime, everyone here is Professor Richard Overy. Enjoy. Richard, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I've had a feeling for a long time that in 100 years' time, people are not going to feel about the Second World War the way that many do today, which is this kind of messianic once-in-a-thousand-year struggle against evil. But it will be seen within the context of the great European great power wars, the global wars, the War of Spanish Succession, Seven Years' War, Napoleonic Wars, French Revolutionary Wars, First and Second World War. They will be seen as having much more in common than at the moment we think they're dissimilar.

Well, I think that if you want a context for the Second World War in particular, I think we need to go back into the 19th century, but perhaps not too far back. This is not the same as the struggle against Napoleon, though people have often made that kind of comparison. It does seem to me the critical thing really is from the mid-19th century onwards, once European powers had become industrialized, more militarized, the struggle for global power became central to their sense of identity. And it's that struggle which goes on from the mid-19th century through to the 1940s, which seems to me to be the context that really frames both the First World War and the Second

World War. Identity is very interesting there. What do you mean by identity? Well, in this case, I've coined the term in the book, the nation empire, that by the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, European nations were now modernizing rapidly and so on. And they had a strong sense, I think, that their identity as powers relied really on acquiring an empire. The Germans wanted one, the Italians wanted one. Other empires were extended as well. Even in Japan, which began to imitate Europe, of course,

there was a strong sense that having an empire would define them better as a nation. So this concept of a nation empire seems to be central to the whole period from the late 19th century through to the Second World War. What the Germans and Italians and Japanese wanted in the 1930s was something they'd wanted 30, 40, 50 years before. They wanted really to be taken seriously as major imperial powers. So much scholarship now on whether actually empires were a drain on the

metropolitan resources or whether they were great engines of wealth and power. Was this desire deeply misguided? Did these home nations accrue any benefits from these empires other than getting in giant fights with other imperial powers? Well, that was one of the downsides of empire. Clearly for the British and French, of course, there were advantages. Really, merchant communities grew enormously wealthy on imperial trade over this period. The Dutch, too, depended very much on the development of the Dutch East Indies and so on. I think the important thing is what one German historian has called fantasy empires. In the late 19th century, all European powers were good at creating kind of fantasy

empire in their minds. Most people in Europe didn't go to the empire, never saw it, were not interested much in the empire. But the idea that you had an empire full of, you know, all the normal things, you printed all the stamps of each colony and so on, was seen as an important way of defining you as a great power. And it was misguided because, in the end, the cost for European powers was endless expenses, military campaigns of one kind or another.

In the end, too, we were had a descent into the First World War and then, of course, the tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s, which really showed, I think, how the pursuit of territorial empire was now anachronistic. The damage it did was enormous. It's often said the Second World War just grew naturally after the First World War and people talk about a second 30 years war. So you think we really should think about the Second World War and the First World War, and people talk about the second 30 years war. So you think we really should think about the Second War and the First World War together?

Well, I think we should, because in the First World War, all the major states that took part, apart from the United States, were empires, of course, either dynastic empires or colonial empires abroad. But I would link them in a rather different way from the way they're normally linked. They're normally linked to the failure of Versailles and so on resentments built up between the great powers etc this was another balance of power crisis etc I mean I would see the first world war as a war which benefited Britain and France their empires grew larger and more successful in the 1920s penalized the Italians because they were not given a share of the new empire. The Germans lost their empire entirely. The Japanese were frustrated. And so out of the First World War and its aftermath,

there grew what I see as toxic resentment, really, against the British and the French who dominated the global order and a desire to imitate them, to have their own territorial empires, which would, in some sense, benefit the home population and enhance their prestige. The problem I keep finding myself thinking is, obviously this looks absurd to us, but do we not let Russia, the Soviet Union,

and America off the hook? Because weren't they empires? Hadn't America been a great example of what Germany's trying to achieve, which is create Lebensraum in the American West across the continent and then grow into an unbelievably wealthy nation state. I mean, I always think the Americans get away with murder, a bit of a slight

of hand. They go, well, of course, we're not an empire, we're a cohesive nation state. Well, lots of people like to think of America as being imperial power from the 19th century, but it seems to be misleading because what I'm talking about here is the pursuit of territorial empire. Now, the United States, of course, expanded across the continent in the 19th century, and I can call that imperialism perhaps of a kind. But the creation of territorial empires in which the populations were subjects, of course, not citizens, which could be exploited fully by the imperial power, it seems to me to be the defining feature. Now, the Soviet Union, too, inherited the Russian Empire,

which had colonized, of course, much of Central and Eastern Asia. But again, the Soviet Union is the non-imperial power. Lenin and his heritage, it's strongly anti-imperial. And it does seem to me that the critical element in this is the desire on the part of European states and the nature of Japan to occupy territory in Asia, in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, and to use that as a way of defining themselves as great powers. Even after 1945, of course, there's a lot of argument what sort of Soviet empire, what sort of American empire. Well, I argue in this book that, yes, of course, they're hegemonic powers as noted about that they dominate the regions that owe them some kind of allegiance whether it's the communist world or

whether it's a capitalist world but they're not territorial empires in that sense and that's what dies in 1945 takes some time to be killed off up to the 1960s but this seems to be in 1945 is the death knell of a particular kind of empire which dates right back to the periods, but it seems to be that 1945 is the decennial of a particular kind of empire, which dates right back to the period when the Portuguese and the Spanish first colonised in the 16th century. I suppose that's the bright legacy of the Second World War amidst all the horror, is it does kill off this idea that empires are desirable, achievable, legitimate, and that waging war to expand one's empire is good statecraft. Yes, it does end that period. It does end it, I think, very messily. And I think

one of the things I've tried to stress in the book is not only the role that, say, British, French, or Dutch imperialism plays in the earlier period, but how difficult it is to disengage. They do so violently. They continue to wage imperial wars, whether it's in Malaya, whether it's in Algeria, whether it's in Indonesia, to the 1940s and 1950s, often at great cost in lives and money. So that the end of empire in that sense is extremely messy. I mean, it's massively violent from the defeat of Germany, Japan and Italy, but it remains violent down to the 1960s. So we're looking at a period of almost a century in which the struggle for global empire, in a sense, defines the nature of conflict. It's so interesting because the historiography, our memory of the Second World War has been

so spun and laundered here in the UK. And we talk about the Battle of Britain, it was a struggle for freedom, a struggle for democracy. And actually, I've always been struck, whenever I've talked to veterans of that struggle, that they thought they were fighting for king and empire. They saw it quite simply as another great imperial struggle, which happened to be fought in this case over the skies of Sussex, but they would have been happy to fight in Malta or the Middle East or wherever they'd been sent, as their fathers had before them. Yeah, indeed. I mean, in the case of France, of course, France had defeated so quickly that hardly matters. The French did see their war as a war of mobilising the empire against German power.

But yes, in the British case, fighting the King Empire, and indeed much of the fighting takes place in imperial areas and by imperial forces, of course, and not by British forces at all. I mean, I think that's a perspective that we've, in a sense, lost sight of. You know, in North Africa, the majority of forces were not British. In the Middle East, the majority of forces were not British. In the Far East, the majority of forces were not British. The British war is really from Normandy onwards. And I think that we need to reconfigure the way we look at the war. It doesn't mean,

of course, that the British Empire was the same as Nazi Germany. It clearly wasn't. And clearly, it's a good thing in the end that Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy were defeated in the Second World War. But we should not, by exploiting that idea, lose sight of the fact that this was a war about competing empires. How should we see British strategy given that mindset? The desire to, for example, postpone opening up a second front in Northwest Europe. I mean, is that just about material and logistics and numbers? Or is that also about the nature of this imperial mindset that had other priorities around the globe? this imperial mindset that had other priorities around the globe?

Well, it's a paradox, actually. The man chosen to defend democracy in the early days was Churchill, who was an arch-imperialist. And there's no doubt that Churchill's view of British strategy in the Second World War is very coloured by the desire not to lose the Asian empire, to retain a grip on the Middle East as the kind of hub between the Asian empire and the Motherland, to defeat the Italians in East Africa, to fight the war in other people's territory, Egypt, for example.

And all this was, of course, to make sure that British global power was retained, because if they just abandoned that, as they could have done, they would have been left stuck in Britain, and they would have had no choice but to wait until it was possible to invade Hitler's Europe. And if America had not come in, that would have been impossible. But for Churchill and for so many of the British leadership, the critical thing was maintaining that global grip. Because without that, it was assumed Britain would not be a major power. Should we look at Churchill's rhetoric in 1940? Does he talk about that? Or by painting Hitler as a sort of once-in-a-millennium threat to all that was decent and civilized in humanity, is he trying to distract? Is he trying to

have his cake and eat it so you maintain your own empire whilst destroying that of Germany? Well, yes, that was effectively what Churchill wanted to do. And the difference in 1940, of course, is that the metropolitan power itself is threatened. And that does make a difference, of course. You know, the rhetoric, the struggle is seen as a struggle now, which is a very British one. But in fact, it involved the Royal Navy and the Air Force in much more limited conflicts than the conflict that was eventually to engulf the Far East and Eastern Europe. But for Churchill in 1940, it's important you've got to protect the

metropolitan power, otherwise you have no empire at all. In the French case, they failed to defend the metropolitan power. They were defeated by the Germans very quickly. And the French empire began to unravel also very, very quickly. So that 1942, the French colonial minister resigned. She says there is no longer an empire. What's the point of having a colonial ministry? And so Churchill didn't want that to happen because if Britain had been defeated or had to admit defeat in 1940, then the empire goes too. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking about the Second World War with Richard Overy. More after this.

What caused the anarchy? How did medieval migrants shape the language I'm speaking right now? Who won the Hundred Years' War? Could England's lost patron saint be buried under a tennis court in Suffolk? How did England's last medieval king end up under a car park? And were the Dark Ages really all that dark? I'm Dr Kat Jarman. And I'm Matt Lewis.

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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 the brits in both the first world war and the second world war didn't go as far as wilson but they embraced the language of to a certain extent freedom and democracy and self-determination in order to overcome their imperial rival. In doing so,

did they undermine their own claims to empire? Well, that's an interesting question. They did use internationalist language because that seemed respectable. And they did want to defend, obviously, democracy in the Western world. They did see themselves as the power that ran so-called liberal empire. In other words, an empire that was not too oppressive and so on, et cetera, et cetera. But this was, to a large extent, hypocritical, really, in the 1920s and 1930s. But, you know, we need to distinguish between two things.

There was the majority in Britain that did share that view of a liberal order, did share that view that the defence of democracy was worthwhile, et cetera, et etc., without really thinking, I think, a great deal about empire, about what it meant. Even in the Second World War, there's this curious paradox, and nobody really questions the fact that you're at war with three new empires that want to build an empire, and you use the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, as Roosevelt does, to justify why you're at war, while conveniently forgetting that you've declared virtual martial law in Egypt, that

you've put 60,000 people in prison in India, and so on and so on. It's a paradox, I think, which is never really resolved in the Second World War, but has to be confronted fully in 1945, once Germany, Japan, and Italy are out of the way. Post-45, although, as you say, the Europeans fight sort of bloody stubborn rear guard actions for empire, what's more devastating to the idea of empire? The horrors that have been inflicted on the world during the greatest imperial struggle the world's ever known, 39 to 45, well, late 30s to 45, or the fact that Europe was bust and European voting publics wanted welfare states. I mean, what was the, obviously it's interaction,

but when you talk about identity and culture, how much of this is how we felt and how much of this is just, we came up against the limits of what Stirling could do? I mean, I think in the British case, the problem was that there was a large leadership core, even among the Labour Party, who thought hanging on to empire was a good thing. You could liberalise it and so on,

but you'd still need to have an empire. And yet that very obvious sense that the British public had too, that the German-Japanese empire building had been vicious in the extreme. And if that's really what empire building meant, well, they wanted none of it. They wanted to get back to building a welfare state, building housing, looking after people, building up social welfare services, and so on and so on.

And there's plenty of evidence that by 1945 in Britain and the United States too, these were really priorities. Let's get the domestic front right. And if that means withdrawing from empire, what's striking in Britain, I think, is how little effect that seems to have on the British population in the 1940s and 50s. You would assume that there'd be a terrible reaction, there'd be a kind of hangover from the end of empire. But actually, even the loss of India, for example, in 1947, doesn't have the sort of impact on the British public you would expect it to have, which suggests that actually all along empire has been something pursued by elites rather than by the masses. I'm sure that's true. I also wonder, was it easier to serve up a diet of Dan Buster's films and D-Day stories and Battle of Britain stories to salve any pain that there might have been from

the end of empire? No, exactly, yes. I mean, remembering the Second World War that way, the British struggle against Hitler, which was not untrue, of course, sidestepped everything else about the global order or disorder during the Second World War and Britain's role in the Middle East, in the Far East, in India, and so on. And indeed, 20, 30 years later,

I could find myself teaching students who had no idea what the all red route was, had no idea that Britain had possessions from Gibraltar to Aden to India, and were puzzled by the fact that I would talk about empire in the context of the Second World War. So very quickly I think that was eliminated and instead, yes, you have the dam busters narrative of the Second World War. Speaking of empire, you give a lot of attention in your book to the war in East Asia, starting in East Asia, really. Why do you think this is something else that you feel needs sort of rebalancing?

Yeah, I mean, the war on the Far East is enormous, of course. The number of casualties are vast. And it's something, certainly in Britain, perhaps more than America, that was lost sight of in the years after 1945. We now, thankfully, have a large historical literature now addressing this question. There's a huge amount of research being done in China and Japan as well. But it was a critical factor.

Look at China today. China is the superpower. And we have to look back to the origins of that new superpower in the struggles that went on in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. And that's why I brought it into the book, because it seems to me that if we're talking about grand geopolitical changes brought about by the war, this is really one of the critical ones, the way in which East Asia changes. And how about the way in which naked Japanese pushed for empire in the 1930s. How did that affect not just Chinese internal politics

and East Asian politics? How do you think it affected the European scene? Well, for Europeans, of course, East Asia was a long way away. I mean, it was part of an imperial zone, but they were too worried about what was going on at home, about the set of fascism and so on. They paid much, much less attention to that. As a result, of course, Japan could get away

with a lot more than one might have expected. We always focus on, for example, the Manchurian crisis. The League of Nations discusses that as quite a flurry in Britain of protests against the occupation of Manchuria. But then almost no interest whatsoever in the fact that the Japanese then push on into controlling the whole of Inner Mongolia

and Northern China over the course of three or four years. It almost disappeared from the history books. And I think we need to refocus. If we're talking about this big war, as I do in the book, then we have to globalize it. We have to think about what is a big war, a big war between China and Japan. So what else do you feel requires recalibration in the way that we remember and study the Second World War? labels on building living space. I mean, that's something everybody talks about. But how do they do it? What were the plans? Why is it that this is the area where the Jews are killed? Why is it that the Germans could produce a plan that they wanted 30 million Slavs to basically starve to

death? You know, why is it that German imperialism results in the deaths of an estimated 16, 20 million people in this area? Now, there's quite a lot of literature written on that too, but I think, again, you don't tend to see it as a program of German empire building and everything that went with it. It's a classic example of vicious colonialism. We tend to see it as a series of battles, which eventually the Soviet Union won, which we then attach to our Western narrative. And you also point out the long historic, so Nazism not as an abominable new force in Germany, but this is an urge that Eastern space-seeking with long historical antecedents. Yeah, long.

I mean, you go right back to the Middle Ages, of course. But for our purposes, the critical thing, I think, comes in the 1880s and 90s when the German colonial league was very keen on overseas territories. But in fact, many German nationalists have always looked east and think about the east and the possibilities of the east. And that's revived in the 1920s when they lose their colonial empire completely. And those Germans who want living space, and living space is a buzzword of the 1920s, where are they going to

get it? Well, they're going to get it in the East. The East is primitive, barbaric. Soviet Union is a barbarous system. We'll take it over and modernise it and civilise it. When you talk about the German colonial league and you talk about this idea of living space, it seems so absolutely bonkers to us now. And it's so recent. And it's espoused by people actually with whom we share quite a lot. These are not 14th century Mongols. We do feel quite some distance. For me, reading your book, I was so terrified by how quickly that pendulum can shift. And one wonders whether in our lifetime, because this is something that occurred in the lifetime

of people alive today, in the lifetime of our children, our grandchildren. Will we ever see that again? I mean, it was such a radically different way of looking at the world. Well, it's a horrifying thought. I mean, the extraordinary thing is, when I wrote the book, I was familiar with it, much of this, of course, as I grew up. But the more I wrote, the more distant it seems and the more fantastic it seems.

But these are people, you know, grandparents, great-grandparents, who experienced this, whose worldview was like this, whose mental map of the world was like that. In 100 years' time, who knows? I mean, historians are very bad at predicting the future. But who knows? Crisis, we hope, is going to go away, but there's plenty of crisis today. But the mental map we have will be different.

We now have a world of nation states, we have superpowers who were not superpowers from the 1930s, we no longer have territorial empires, Europe apart from Britain now has a union. So our mental map of the world is different from the mental map of the 1930s. That was a mental map that was essentially anachronistic, it drew on hundreds of years of European history. And that, it seems to me, is what was brought to an abrupt end in 1945. Well, I think that's true, but that's what's so powerful about your work, is the mental map.

Today, we spend a lot of time talking about, perhaps we're all a bit Marxist, we talk about the kind of economic substructure, we talk about technology, and we talk about climate breakdown, as if these are giant forces that are impelling us and limited things that humans can do about it. Your work does put culture, identity, and ideas squarely at the heart of this, one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell the human race. That makes the things that we say and do and write and share very, very important. That's absolutely right. I mean, when we look at the discourses in Japan in the 1920s

or Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, what drives it are ideas, buzzwords, the culture, and those are absorbed. They're absorbed by Hitler, for example, who doesn't make a lot of this up himself. He draws on an idea world already there in the 19th century. Yes, I mean, that's one of the things I want to get across in my book, how important it is, the way people think, the culture they develop,

the ideas that they feel are legitimate. And that's something we need to be aware of in the 21st century. Who are creating the buzzwords? How do we think about the future? What are the dangers involved in any of this? I mean, I think we live in a less malign world now than the 1920s and 30s but it's still something i think one needs to be aware of we can't go around every single nation and talk about how they remember the war i'm always struck by the soviet celebrations on their version of v-day when they often invite

the chinese and they have quite a sort of militaristic march through Red Square. It always feels somewhat different, disturbingly different to the way we think about it in the West. But we have our own idiosyncrasies when we remember the war. Do you tear your hair out when you hear the way that the Second World War is bandied about in our popular discourse? I mean, how should we think about it? How should we remember it here in the UK?

Well, I think we should probably remember it with a bit more humility. There are plenty of things in Britain's war effort which one might like to gloss over. But we must remember that waging total war, of course, makes for a relative morality. You've got to win the war. And if that involves bombing German cities or indeed dropping atomic bombs on Japan,

at the time you can see how people were able to justify it. And I think we need to see it as not as a straightforward good war, but to see that to win the war, you've got to make choices which later on you might look back at and regret. And that seems to me to be something we need to be aware of, that it's not all a story of the good and the great. It's a mixed story. Thank you very much, Richard.

We haven't even scratched the surface. The surface remains unscratched of your gigantic work, but I really appreciate you coming on the podcast to talk about it. I hope one day I get a chance to talk to you again. Tell everyone what the book's called. The book is called Blood and Ruins, The Great Imperial War, 1931 to 1945.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks.

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