School of War - Ep. 24: Richard Overy on World War II

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Richard Overy, professor of history at the University of Exeter, joins the show to discuss World War II and the wars of imperial aggression. Times 02:23 - Introduction 04:24 - Imperialism prior to World War II 06:00 - Nations as empires 08:32 -Traditional imperialism versus the Axis Powers' concept 11:02 - Who is Halford Mackinder? 13:14 - The development of Germany's vision of empire 14:36 - German war aims in World War I and World War II 17:02 - Germany and the East 22:16 - The Japanese vision of empire 25:01 - How Japan modernization 26:33 - Japan's methods of rule 27:50 - American and the USSR 34:06 - World War II book recommendations

The First World War is usually cited as the end of an era for a certain kind of European politics, the end of the long 19th century. But even though the Russian Empire was delta blow and German dreams of empire were set back, the British and French Empire survived. And when the Nazis came to power in Germany, they set about building a radical vision of empire modeled on those of their neighbors, just as their Axis partners, the Japanese, and the Italians were doing. It was World War II that truly signaled the end.

of the great era of European territorial empire, an era that ended in the words of the writer Leonard Woff, not in a peaceful burial, but in blood and ruins. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a staleming. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. These buildings down.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Before we get to today's interview, I'd like to share a word from our sponsor, The Spectator. As the longest running magazine in the world, the Spectator eschews identity politics in favor of intelligent conversation and thought. From the war in Ukraine to the ideological war in the classroom,

From the rise of inflation to the rise of cancel culture, the Spectator has been dedicated to stimulating reporting and analysis since 1828. The U.S. edition of The Spectator has just newly come ashore and is bringing the magazine's unique brand of high-quality writing and analysis to American audiences for the first time. The Spectator also covers the best in books, travel, food, wine, and much, much more. Sign up today, and you'll receive three free months of the print magazine and full digital access, plus they're going to send you a free spectator hat. Just go to spectatorworld.com slash special offer and use offer code SOWW. And you'll get access to their amazing contributors, including Christopher Buckley, Christopher

Caldwell, and Douglas Murray. Sign up today to get three months of the spectator and get your free hat at spectator. At spectatorworld.com slash special offer, use offer code SOWW at checkout. Back to the episode. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War today. Joined today by Richard Overy. He is professor of history at the University of Exeter.

He's written and edited more than 30 books, including most recently, the magnificent blood and ruins, the Great Imperial War 1931 to 1945. Richard, thanks so much for joining. Thank you. I thought I'd start the conversation today with a question that's sort of half choking, but half maybe a serious way into some of the most important. issues that your book raises, which in the in the preface, you make the, the observation or the claim that quote, the long second world war was the last imperial war. And I feel sitting here on,

we're recording on Wednesday, February the 23rd, you have Russian regular troops moving into these two new, quote unquote, independent statelets in the eastern part of Ukraine. And to put it mildly, a pretty good chance that they're going to move further west or that Russia is going to invade Ukraine from other directions. My first question to you is, you know, are you going to need to update this claim in subsequent editions of the book? Maybe not have seen the end of imperial war.

Well, maybe not, but I've chosen this for the Second World War because it's really the end of a particular kind of territorial empire that established mainly by European states going back four to a hundred years, where they established, you know, colonies, protectuits, one, client states, and so on, but dominated them territorially and dominated them as subject peoples. Russia's expansion is, you know, it's, Russia is a hegemonic power, and it's doing what hegemonic powers often do. But I don't see this as the same kind of territorial empire that I'm talking about as in the book. Well, maybe we can start there then. What is the

the kind of territorial empire that comes to the fore as a system of politics and in rule prior to the Second World War, which in your view of things, the war ends? Well, I take it back to the late 19th century with the so-called new imperialism. European empire existed, of course, since the 15th, 16th century. But the new imperialism was the point at which the major powers spread out into all the areas of the world had not yet been taken over in Asia, in Africa, in the Pacific and so on. The new stage, Germany and through Japan wanted to join that scramble. They did so, but not very successfully.

And after the First World War, all three of them thought that what they really needed to become great powers was the kind of territorial empire that the British, the French, even the Belgians of the Dutch. And that would be the key to becoming a great power again. It was anachronistic, looking back to, in fact, the past age, a delusion in the end. But that's why I'm talking about a particular kind of empire. It seems to be that it arises with the geopolitical changes brought about at the end of the 19th century, modernizing states, industrializing states, and so on mass politics, wanting to establish what I call in the book, Nation empires.

And that's what Japan and Germany initially wanted. And in 1930s, they fought for it. In the 1940s, they fought a world war for it. What is a nation empire as a subset of presumably other kinds of territorial empires? Well, nation empire, it again emerges really at the end of the 19th century with the rise of European nationalism, a proper sense of national identity. And the need in a way to secure that identity by demonstrating wider power in the world.

So the establishment of an empire, territorial empire, is seen as a way of, it's a paradox in a way, it's a way of securing national identity, if you like. So the nation empire became,

for them a very important phenomenon. It meant you were not just France, but you were greater France, as they called it. You're not just Britain, but you were the British Empire, which covered a third of the globe. And that's, in a way of the Japanese,

in the Italians and the Germans want to do as well. They wanted to establish an empire that secured their national identity. And you, I mean, it certainly seems on its face and you kind of, you get at multiple times in the book that there's a sort of tension here even within the very concept, the notion of a nation empire, these notions of nationalism, which seems to, seem to suggest a kind of equality that evoke the French Revolution and some kind of echo on the one hand. And then, rule on the other, rule by one people of another. How does that tension ultimately play out? Or is that relevant to the account?

No, it is. I mean, it is an obvious tension. And because most of the people in the nation states of Europe never went to the empire and never really understood what it was. But they did know, whether it was postage stamps or movies or whatever it was. They had some way of recognizing that their power spread over. overseas. But of course it was a paradox. At home, in France, in particular, of course, you were establishing parliamentary democracies and so on. In the colonies, you had no intention

of establishing parliamentary democracy. So there was one rule for the nation, one rule to the empire. And in the end, that's what the Germans and the Japanese, the Italians do in the Second World War. They take over, in fact, not a sovereign state, China, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and they think they can turn them into subpoet peoples, you know, like the empires of the 19th century.

And of course, they couldn't. And that was, you know, again, one of the major factors in the collapse of empire during the Second World War.

Is that the, or a principal difference between this new wave of empires that, you know, the fascist powers like Germany, Italy, Japan have with the older version

is that they are targeting sovereign states? What are the big differences between the vision of empire that the access powers have just to speak collectively for a moment and then we can go into detail and the old version

I mean one major difference as you said they're attacking the sovereign states all of the members of the League of Nations so it's bizarre to think that is colonial territory or territory that can be part of an empire and the other thing is simply the speed with which they have to do it The British and the French, Dutch and so on, it took a long time to build up their empires.

They became increasingly greedy for the territory and increasingly violent as the 19th century went on. But this was a slow process. The Germans wanted to create an empire in 10 years or less, and they were quite willing to embrace genocide to do so. But the genocides in the earlier empire building, whether it's the Aborigines of Australia, whether it's, you know, Native Americans, of course, this took decades or centuries. So the real problem is that these are quite radical empires, they want to transform the world in a handful of years, where the other empires, of course, have taken, in some cases, centuries to develop.

And these are popular programs or populist programs in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini, the Japanese government, are successfully mobilizing popular sentiment behind their goals. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's less evident, I think, in the Italian case, because much of the Italian population by the late 1930s got pretty tired at Mussolini. But in the case of Germany and of Japan, there was a popular engagement between the population, the imperial ambitions of the leadership. And in Japan, millions of the Japanese identified entirely with the imperial project and resented the fact that the British and Americans, no, wouldn't allow them to do it, or wouldn't allow them do it freely. In Germany, again, the strong sense that, you know, Germany was a civilizing power, or Germany deserved an empire, and the German people deserved somewhere to rule,

and it was wrong with the petition of French and the others to say that they couldn't. You bring up and discuss in the book, Halford McKinder, who has popped up from time to time and other episodes that we have recorded, you know, at one point sort of long-forgotten, writer in some ways inventor of geopolitical thinking at the turn of the you know but the early 20th century in Britain but you bring him up in the way in which his thinking is received in Germany which I think is an important part of the story and one that leaves him his his his reputation and a bit of a cloud depending on who you're you're speaking to about him so maybe just step back for saying who was Halford McKinder what was he saying just to review briefly and then how did the Germans

Well, he was a, I mean, he was a British academic geographer who wrote, it was only an article who he wrote before the First World War, talking about the importance of Eurasia as the world center. And any powers that dominated Eurasia in the future, given, you know, the new age of rail travel, soon the age of air travel and so on, would become a dominant power in the world. and the maritime powers, Britain, France, United States, would become part of the periphery. Now, that appealed, of course, to German jolfes, precisely because Germany was a land power, always looking to the east for decades. And the idea that somehow Germany could be the state that revolutionized Eurasia was something Hitler latched onto the 1920s and developed, of course, by the time of the Barbarossa campaign in 1941. So this vision of a powerful Eurasia,

whoever dominates Eurasia is essentially the world pivot. Now Putin might have read a bit of Mekinder as well, I think, because he clearly has an idea about dominating Eurasia too. But in Hitler's eyes, this was the natural thing for the Germans. It always pressed East and never quite managed it. Now he was going to dominate Eurasia with a Japanese ally on the other side, and then they would turn to the Anglo-Sact. from powers and say, well, you know, we are the power now, whereas I'm powers to count.

So let's speak a bit about the Germans then. And so what before the rise of the Nazi party in a way we're already speaking about this, how does the German vision of empire develop specifically? What's distinct about it compared to British visions and for that matter, Japanese and Italian visions? Well, the German version of empire before the First World War was rather similar. In fact, I mean, it was essentially a race. racist empire in which you, you know, you saw yourself as a superior culture and you were bringing

civilisation and Christianity to the areas that you colonise or indeed conquered. And this was very important for trade and the assumption was a more colonial territory had the rich you would become. The Germans didn't get much colonial territory, I had just a few stretches of Africa and a few Pacific Islands. what they wanted was to do something like the British and the French Empire, lots of territory, lots of resources and markets. And that was an idea that existed in 1920s, certainly among radical nationalist circles.

Many German geographers served the same purpose. They again sort of empire in those terms. But only when Hitler came to par was it possible to turn those sorts of fantasies into reality. Yeah. And then there is just a, I realize that I keep, we keep talking about the lead-up to the war. We haven't really gotten to the war yet, but we'll get there. But in terms of German imperial aims, obviously, and we can go into more detail about this, you know, the Nazis accelerate and, you know, make more acute and violent aspects of German imperialism that existed before. But there are, this is Pritz Fischer's big point, right, about the First World War. German war aims in the First World War at some point do seem similar to German war aims in the Second World War, in the sense that in the First World War, correct? There is discussion of Slavs, of Room to the East. And so those are not brand new concepts for the Nazis, correct? No, no, no, no.

I mean, I make the point in the book. The fantasy is about a Germanized East to go right back to the 18, ages and 90s and so on. And at the end of the First World War, when the new Soviet state has to sign the Treaty of Brest-Dotos in March, 1918, the Germans are suddenly dominating the whole area, Ukraine, Belarusia, and so right down to the Caucasus. And they begin to think that their visions of empire, which many of them have had before 1914, might actually become a reality. So, yes, it's not new. There's always this idea that there's an area that German culture deserve to rule. They couldn't do it in Western Europe.

It couldn't really do it very easily overseas. So the natural place to look is to the east. Well, let's spell that out for a second. Why can't it do it in Western Europe? What, from the German perspective, is so different about France versus, you know, the parts of the Russian Empire? Yeah, well, I mean, they saw the other European states as part of the great power system. they saw that the Slav areas to the East as primitive, even barbaric. I mean, there's the kind of words that you used to describe it.

And therefore, you know, it's a place where the Germans can come, can rule, can transform the area, can take over the resources. But you can't do that very easily in Western or Central Europe. You know, here is a great power system. Powers are, you know, a seen by Germany as equals. But the Slav mass, you know, it's this strange fantasy that somehow the Slavs are only fit to be rules and that the Germans are the best people to do it. Yeah. So the war begins, the war proper. I mean, you point out that the war proper, the period from 1939 to 1945 is, you know, only properly understood as sort of the climactic phase of a much longer story of war, for that matter.

But the war starts, Barbarossa happens. Before that, the Germans have already, you know, gobbled up, Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. And it turns out to be short-lived for reasons we can get to. But for a while there, the Germans do have the start of something like an Eastern Empire. You know, so as they seize it, as territory is growing under their control, how do they think about ruling it? How do they begin the actual implementation of a program of empire? What sources are they drawing on? How do they go about this business?

Yeah, Sam was your question. I mean, the bizarre thing about the Second World War is not just in a German case, but also in a Japanese case too, the strong sense that they've already won, that they can now build their empire, and it will be a long-term empire. You've got the, you know, Heinrich Himler, head of the SS, who was in charge of much of the program in the East, thinking that the Germans are going to rule this area for 500 years and there will be 600 million Germans inhabiting it in the 500 years.

Extraordinary fantasies that somehow the empire, now it's being concrete will become a permanent feature. And so they begin to plan its organization politically. They begin to extract all the resources that they want, because they need them for the war as well. but the idea is that they'll go on once the war's over they extract these resources and the foodstuffs the slavs will become basically subject peoples, forced labourers and so on

and above all they will cleanse the area of all unwanted ethnic groups of which the most obvious for the Jews and then you will settle Germans in many of the areas and these plans are put into operation not just the slaughter of the Jews which does take place of course but they begin to move German settlers in. They want to transform the landscape. They want to build new terms.

And all of this takes place in the space of two or three years in the middle of the middle of the war. Looking back at it, it's simply deluded. But at the time, there was a strange confidence that perhaps they had actually done it. And had they defeated the Soviet Union and started in a suit for peace, then they might have become a permanent power across that part of Eurasia.

I know this is a matter of ongoing debate amongst historians of the period, but everyone seems to agree at a certain point relatively early in the war. This really is all delusional and that there's a ticking clock for the access powers. And I guess, you know, Pearl Harbor is one possible or the German declaration of war on the United States is one possible moment where that gets locked in. Others, I think we go back earlier in the summer. Where do you put it? Is there any point where this might have, where we might live in a world today, where, there is something like a Nazi empire where they actually had a shot at achieving it. Well, it was a close fun thing.

The Allies had to learn to fight much better, a string, a long string of defeats. And, you know, unwillingness or lack of capacity really to confront the Axis. The battles at the end of 1942 are the decisive ones, which suddenly show that the Axis, there is a limit to what the Axis can do. But, you know, if the allies have not been able to collaborate or, you know, if it lost some of those major battles, it's not impossible to imagine. But, you know, once the United States is in the conflict and determined to fight it, it is difficult to see how the Axis states are going to build an empire and be used to settled geopolitical order. So just to stick with German imperialism for a second, then, I'm curious, you, you, you, you, you, you, you know, You mentioned the sort of beginning of a settler program. How does that actually work?

One thinks of earlier European empires, you know, Brits going to India. There's a one to imagine there's a kind of draw to that, that Brits are going to India for economic opportunity and, you know, curiosity and all sorts of human motivations. Is that at play here as well? Is it more compulsion of the Nazi state? You know, what's taking people to the east? Well, not very many people go, of course, to the uncertainty.

and Hitler and Hitler and others, you know, they talk about the colonies, they say the cyber terrorists are going to be colonized, and they start looking around for volunteers. And they can't find very many volunteers, because obviously sensible Germans realize that this is a bit of dangerous place to go. But, you know, that was the idea you just got volunteers. But in the end, they couldn't get enough in Germany, so they basically used the German speakers who lived in Poland or the Baltic states or Romania and moved them to camps in Poland and Germany, and then they'd say we've got a farm for you in Ukraine and send them off.

Thousands of them went and then thousands of them came back three years later. Let's switch to Japan. What is distinctive or unique about the Japanese, you know, late stage vision of territorial empire? Yeah, I mean, it's a curious thing because there's no evidence of it at all in earlier Japanese history, of course. and since 1945, these chances have disappeared entirely. I think it's partly the modernization drive in Japan from the 1860s onwards.

They were desperate to model themselves, particularly on the British, to certainly stand on the Germans. And they did persuade themselves at the territorial empire was the reason why the British was so successful. And they had a right as a sense. civilized Asian people to establish the same kind of empire in Asia. There's one Japanese official who says to a British diplomat, you know,

why is it all right for you to dominate India, but not right for us to dominate China? And that kind of thinking was quite widespread among the Japanese elite during this period. What really pushes them, I think, towards the final decisions is the economic crisis. in 192932 because for Japan that's a catastrophe. It's a very difficult because Japanese agriculture is in great difficulties and so on the seal with industries facing problems and suddenly ex-world markets close down and the Japanese economy is threatened with real crisis. I think that's what tilts a lot of the elite to the idea that, you know,

they've got to do something, they've got to build their own economic order, they've got to challenge a geopolitical nomination of America and Britain, And the only way to do it is go to wars. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, obviously the United States and Japan are allies today and cooperate closely on all sorts of important considerations, not least of which is China. But I've been to the to the Asakuni shrine in Tokyo and then to the museum that's associated with it. And I think I can only go off of the English captions in the museum. But I think it's fair to walk away from that saying that it, you know, essentially Franklin Roosevelt forced them into, you know,

Pearl Harbor and into war. That is certainly the claim, I'll keep it limited, the claim of the people who designed the museum. Yes. No, no, I mean, that was the argument at the time. And I think many Japanese historians have sustained that view since. The British and Americans have been more accommodating. They would have accepted Japanese domination of East Asia, and the Japanese would have had their empire without any problems. Yes, I mean, it's, I mean, it's, I mean, it, it, You can see at one level, from their point of view, it makes sense. But, I mean, the real problem is the war in China, which is clearly legitimate. And China is a sovereign power, has been invaded and occupied and wants to be established its sovereignty.

Yeah. What is it about Japan that allows them to successfully modernize along European lives, you know, beginning at the 19th century, whereas other Asian states essentially do not? Yeah, good question. Good question. I mean, it says much about Japanese society. There was a strong desire from the 1867 onwards to become a great power. As long as Japan had had a destiny, which has gone wrong. And the one way to do that is to build up the military, build up the Navy, build up Japanese industry. And they were able to do it very successfully. It was a cultural gap in a way between the Japanese at that time

and other Asian societies and the Japanese were very good imitators, very good imitators whereas other Asian societies were not imitators, they were dominated by the colonial powers their

heroic ambitions were suppressed and so on and so on. But nobody came into Japan to interfere. So the Japanese were able to develop this themselves. Yeah. And then same question about Japan that we were discussing earlier about Germany. But what is Japanese imperial rule actually look like? How does it function?

Is it all just direct military control or is there a civilian administration or how do they think about ruling the world for the brief period that they get a shot at it? Yeah, well, I mean, they've got to do it in a variety of different ways. I know all of European empires were like that. They were a mix of different kinds of institution. They wanted some colonial areas, and they wanted areas that would remain colonies and links closely to Japan.

Otherwise, they wanted puppet states and protectants and so on. But the object was to make the Japanese emperor the center of an empire system, in which everybody would acknowledge Japan's superiority, that they would be subjects of the empire or the emperor. And even if they had a certain amount of autonomy, they would still all be circling around the imperial system, the empire and the emperor at the center. But, of course, they had to construct this under conditions of war.

So it's quite difficult to predict exactly what it would look like, had they won the war. Otherwise, really, she governed was what dominated. Got it. So how do, just now to step back again, how do the United States, States and also the USSR fit into this scheme we've been discussing for the last half hour. So you have the old territorial empires, you know, sort of constructed and operating along traditional lines, the British, French, and so forth. You have the new, in some ways, much more aggressive, fascist versions competing against

them. America and Russia both in certain obvious respects, they have territorial ambitions. So I guess this is where we start to get into the differences. They shouldn't put it this way. They shouldn't have hegemonic ambitions, but you don't include them, I think, in the book in the scheme of old versus new empires. There's something different about both of them. So walk us through that.

Yes. Well, it was quite clearly United States was going to become one of the world's superpowers because of its economic strength. The Soviet Union modernizing of the Stalin was also turning itself rapidly into a superpower from a ramshackle, Tsarist empire. into a communist-dominated industrial state. And the three Axis powers, particularly Germany and Japan, were very aware of that.

Hitler was very aware that he had to move before the United States began to think about a global role and before the Soviet Union become too strong. So both of those states were strongly anti-imperialists and the old-fashioned imperialist, imperialist sense. and they were both likely to inhibit whatever the Japanese and the Germans and the Chinese wanted to do.

So I think in 1930s there was a moment of opportunity because the Americans were isolationist, Soviet Union had withdrawn because it was building itself up and not yet ready to intervene and so on. So you had to move quickly, establish what empires, your economic zones and so on, and then to run and say, well, hey,

what are you going to do about it? But it turned out they couldn't do that, of course, very quickly, Hitler's ambitions in Europe involved the Soviet Union, Japan's ambitions in China and the Pacific, it involves the electric states. And so whether the likes of a lot, they found they had to fight those two major states as well. And that's perhaps the biggest miscalculation they made, really. You couldn't exclude them. They were dragged into the crisis.

Once they were dragged in, the chances of succeeding building your empire. begins to disappear. Well, to take the American case for a second, there's a kind of American historian who will argue essentially that, you know, superficial, somewhat distracting differences, notwithstanding, the rise of American power in the 19th

and into the 20th centuries is inherently imperial in very old-fashioned ways, that the Spanish-American war has a manifestly imperial outcome from that perspective, a good outcome for the United States, and that it enters the Second World War, Roosevelt has a kind of vision of supplanting the British Empire, which, in effect, in ways that are kind of undeniable happen. But I take it from things that you say in the book that this version lacks a certain nuance. But draw that out. What is different from the American vision versus the British version of ruler or controller? Yes. I mean, I didn't see the American

position as an imperial one of that older sense. Yes, they do. I do. I do. I don't see the American position as an imperial one of that older sense. Yes, they do take over territories from Spain and they're embarrassed by it and eventually, of course, they're going to reward them as some degree of autonomy or independence. I think for most Americans, there's a gut reaction against colonialism, for understandable reasons, of course, because of America's under heritage. And in the Second World War, Roosevelt and his advisors are thinking about how you project American global power. What you're going to do about, of course, as happens after 45, the military bases everywhere, advisors and economic expansion, etc. But what you're not going to do is to build a global colonial empire. And in fact, what you

want to do is encourage the existing empires to dismantle themselves. So, I mean, I do see it as essentially different from the experience of the other major powers. Got it. So Germany, Japan, Italy, lose, the allies win. But you make the case that in certain important respects, it's not actually, just as 1939 was not the beginning of the war in certain respects, 1945 is not the end of it. There's still a kind of playing out of the imperial era that has to work out. Give us a sense of how that actually works.

I mean, I think the most important geopolitical consequence of the Second World War was that following the defeat of the Japanese German and the Italian empires, the other empires days were numbered. And you call a 20-year period in which colonial empires, some of which stretch back two or three hundred years or more, disbandled. And a world of independent nations is established. It's also the period of course of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, who became the superpowers of the Second World War, also. transform a geopolitical system through their domination. So the Second World War signals that this big end is coming. It's really about the late 1950s, 1960s, and most of the empowers have unraveled. And there's no question that this is a bipolar system with the Soviets and American power

dominating everything else. And a world of nation states, which is the world we live with today still. many people concentrate on the post-45 period they concentrate on what's happening in Europe they concentrate on the disruption, the refugee crisis and so on and so on. Very few historians actually see the unraveling of Empire-Rast 45s link with what's happening in the war, but I think they're intimately linked. My favorite novels, or is a sequence of novels by Paul Scott called the Raj Quartet. I don't know if you've had the pleasure, but of course it's a literary documentation of

I warmly recommend them to you. They were made into a fantastic BBC miniseries in the 80s, which is really quite good. But the first novel is called The Jewel and the Crown. And they document, start in 1943, run through partition, document at the end of the British Empire in India. Magnificent, magnificent books. So you make an observation,

sort of a throwaway observation, an obvious one, but an important one that when you started your career as a historian, And one could, I think you say, you could read everything that matters, essentially. One person could read everything that matters about the war. And in 2022, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I thought I'd just ask you, you know, in addition, of course, to the blood and ruins in your other works, what should people read who want to understand this great cataclysm that, you know, all but destroyed the world, certainly destroyed an old world and made a new world in the middle of the 20th century?

What are the best things that have been written that people should turn to? Well, good question. I mean, I think part of the problem with the literature of last 30 or 30 years, because it's become more and more specialized in detail. So there are 50 books or 100 books on Normandy. There are 20 books on the Italian campaign. A thousand books on Weberosa. And it's difficult to take a global view.

I mean, I found writing this book very difficult. because you've now got to include so much and taking up to so much literature. So, you know, finding half a dozen books that you could recommend to somebody to go away and read is, it's very difficult to do, I think. I mean, there are some books that I've been very impressed by recently. Walter Heimrich's book on the Pacific War, I think, is a remarkable book, I think. Evan Maudsley, another British historian, writing on the Eastern Front too, I think. because, you know, he's certainly well worth reading.

On Germany, while there are plenty of borgheims of Hitler, which tried to reformulate the story in one way or another, but Ian Kershaw's work on Hitchlow, and also his book on Turning Points in the Second World War, you know, you learn a lot from reading those. But, yeah, I mean, I could give you a list of 100 books. Sure. In terms of what's new and good, what are the books that have meant or mattered the most to your view of things that have affected you the most?

Recently, you mean? No, no, in general, in the long run. Oh, right. Well, I'll tell you, a surprising thing. There was a small textbook on Total War produced by an American historian of France called Gordon Wright, called The Ordeal of Total War. It's produced as part of a series in 1968. and I remember reading that as a student being enormously impressed by it, how he could stand back from the conflict and already understand it in ways which other historians couldn't.

Rather like Blood and Ruins, what he did was to provide some kind of a narrative for us, but actually breaking up into chapters of the themes related to the war. And I've never forgotten that book. I've got on my shelves here. And in fact, I mentioned it in the preface. And that's a book that's influenced. me interested me a lot at the time thinking about how you approach the history of the Second World War. More recently, it's difficult.

I mean, there are a few books that I point to and say, well, if I hadn't read I wouldn't know X. But one of the most important books recently is the book by the Oxford historian Rana Mitter on the Chinese War, who really opened, when he wrote that, I mean, he opened up from the West Nordians, a corner of the big corner of the war that people knew. very little about, partly because they just, you know, most Western Forest don't have a language facilities to be able to do there. And

around up a very important role, I think, in alerting people to how much we still need to know about the war in Asia. Now, since then, there's been quite a number of very good books by British and American historians. But his was

in many ways a pioneer book. I mean, those are two examples, you know, I can give you. in the future. Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins. Thank you so much for making the time today. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.