I always rather dislike being called a television historian, preferring to see myself as an historian who enjoys talking about his subject: in that sense, at least, television, books and lectures are simply different parts of the same process. Yet there is no doubt that I am exactly of an age to have been profoundly influenced by television history. The BBC series The Great War appeared in my last year at school, and I can well remember watching some of its episodes on a tiny television in the worn and fusty setting of a house-room at my boarding school. It introduced the real complexities of its subject to an audience that either knew nothing about the war or had accepted at face value some of the more egregious comments that then passed for fact. Despite the best endeavours of Dr Noble Frankland, then Director of the Imperial War Museum (whose generosity in reducing the charges that the museum might otherwise have charged for copyright material had made the series possible in the first place), it took some extraordinary liberties with its use of visual images, blurring the boundaries between reconstructed and actuality sequences. It nevertheless deserves the much overused description 'landmark', and, as Dr Frankland has written, 'it launched the idea of history on screen'.
In 1973, almost a decade later, when I was in the early stages of my career as a military historian, pecking away at my doctoral thesis with the one-finger typing that kept the makers of Tipp-Ex in profits, the Thames Television series The World at War appeared. I was captivated at once. The poignant rise and fall of Carl Davis's music; the montage of extraordinary facial photographs in the pre-title sequence, each successively burned away to reveal another, like pages of an album seared by heat, and the mellifluous enunciation of Laurence Olivier, all had me enthralled even before I had properly watched a single episode. Once I began to watch, I was hooked. The breadth of the 26-episode series, shaped and sustained by the directing brain of Jeremy Isaacs, the series producer, was simply breathtaking. This was no narrowly Eurocentric story, but just what its name implied, the Second World War from background to legacy, and from the freezing waters of the North Atlantic through the sands of the Western Desert to the jungles of Burma. What struck me then was the remarkable quality of the eyewitnesses who had been interviewed, and the way in which the words of the men and women who had 'fought, worked or watched' were put at the very centre of the television treatment. For instance, I shall never forget hearing Christabel Bielenberg, a British woman married to a German lawyer, describing the rise of Hitler: suddenly the events of 1933–36 were not something that had happened long ago and far away, but a personal story being told by a familiar voice. She was to call her book The Past is Myself, and reading the transcripts of her interview I see how apt that phrase is, and just what an impact personal accounts like this have had on my own development as a historian.
Looking at the series when it was first screened I was struck by its success in gaining access to so many men and women who had seen the wider picture, and having now had access to the full range of interviews, I am even more impressed. To select a few names, almost at random, there are the words of John Colville, Churchill's urbane and perceptive Private Secretary; Hasso-Eccard Freiherr von Manteuffel, one of the most successful practitioners of armoured warfare; Vera Lynn, 'The Forces' Sweetheart', whose songs caught the mood of Britain at war; 'Manny' Shinwell, veteran Labour politician; Francis de Guingand, Montgomery's Chief of Staff; Albert Speer, Hitler's architect turned Armaments Minister, with his insider's view of power politics in the Third Reich, and two of the apostles of air power, Arthur Harris of the RAF's Bomber Command and Curtis LeMay of what was then still the United States Army Air Force.
But of course this was not a series that concentrated on 'captains and the kings'. There were many ordinary men and women too – American, British, Canadian, German, Japanese – telling us about the extraordinary times they lived through, and who, but for their necessarily brief appearances, might otherwise have left no mark on history. A mother describes the death of her children in an air-raid shelter, a rescue worker tells of holding a teenage girl's hand as she choked to death, and a Merchant Navy officer catalogues the deaths of his crew in an open boat in the Atlantic. There are moments of quite extraordinary and sometimes shocking intimacy. One interviewee reflected on Neville Chamberlain's 'deadly decency'; another remembered how Stalin looked like 'a most cunning and cruel peasant' when seen across the table, and a Singapore veteran saw the first Japanese soldiers, 'extremely tired men, grim-visaged', enter the city.
When I was invited to edit the archive of interview transcripts compiled when the series was made, I first saw the material, on a blazing hot afternoon in the early summer of 2006, in the Imperial War Museum's quiet annexe in Austral Street, behind the main museum. It was contained in twenty-nine files housed in the sort of brown metal filing cabinet that I remember, from my first job as a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, as standard civil-service issue. Because of complex copyright issues the material had previously been inaccessible to researchers, and I knew that it had taken a small army of lawyers and publishers to reach the agreement that made this book possible. Although, at this stage in my life, I am not easily impressed, there was a real sense of excitement and discovery as the door to the cabinet grunted open. It was immediately clear, as I flicked through the files on that first afternoon, that there was far, far more material than was ever aired. I knew from my own experience as a television presenter that an extraordinary amount of interviews (usually including my own favourite pieces to camera) finishes up on the cutting-room floor, and this series was certainly no exception. There were all sorts of reasons for his. Often an individual producer simply had too much material to fit into his programme; several interviewees might say much the same thing and only the most cogent would be used, and reflective grunts or long pauses defeated even the sharpest editorial scissors. Many transcripts included the questions, and it was intriguing to see how some interviewers obtained (or at times, despite their best efforts, failed to obtain) the answers they sought. I have used extracts from 280 of 368 transcripts, both using a wider selection of material from individuals who did indeed feature in the finished series, and rescuing some interviewees from total obscurity.
The transcripts were made as guides to producers and directors, and naturally lack the polish of something always designed for publication: this was a nuisance at times, but it was also part of the immediacy of the accounts and the project's excitement. Numerous urns and errs were faithfully reproduced in typescript, but personal and place names sometimes defeated the transcribers. In addition to tidying up the transcripts, for instance by the deletion of repetitions and murmurs, I have added or corrected names that had been omitted from, or been distorted in, the originals, and remedied some of the more obvious translation errors to make the transcripts more accessible. I have enjoyed the advantage of being able to insert occasional explanatory footnotes, so as to use material disqualified from the programmes because it was not adequately self-explanatory. I am delighted to have the opportunity of filling in some of the blanks and of developing some areas that the makers of the series could not address. In this sense my task was far easier than theirs, for I could manoeuvre the material within a framework of my own design, and was under no obligation to make all my chapters the same length. They did not have the same luxury with their episodes.
It is important to remember that oral history has both strengths and weaknesses. In my previous work I have found that even interviews conducted soon after an event reveal memories rapidly conforming to a narrative conditioned by what interviewees have heard from others, like witnesses chattering before a court case. Sometimes there is a deliberate desire to bend or even break the truth. To take an extreme example, we now know that Alger Hiss (not definitively exposed as a Russian agent when the series was made) was certainly not speaking the whole truth when interviewed for this series. Sometimes an interviewee makes an honest error. General Gamelin did not, as Edwards Spears suggests, travel to England to tell Winston Churchill that there was no strategic reserve in 1940: Churchill actually received this disquieting information from French premier Edouard Daladier. Sometimes two well-informed interviewees differ on points of significant detail: one Japanese naval officer tells us that the British experience of torpedo-bombing in shallow water at Taranto influenced the Japanese plan for Pearl Harbor, while another assures us, no less categorically, that it did not. Historians often strive to strike a balance, and those who lived through history often feel no need to equivocate, but have firm views which they are happy to express. An RAF bomber pilot regretted the end of the war only because some Germans were still alive, and a senior Staff Officer described Churchill's decision to send troops to Greece in 1941 bluntly as 'military nonsense'. Noble Frankland was interviewed both in his capacity as a veteran of Bomber Command and as a distinguished historian. He wisely points out that the words of interviewees are indeed primary evidence, not just about the war itself, 'but how it appeared to these people in 1971–3' as well.
There are moments when first-hand evidence confirms the truth of what is sometimes written off as myth, or establishes an intriguing and counterintuitive line of argument. In the deadly chaos of Pearl Harbor one interviewee did indeed hear a chaplain say, 'Praise God and pass the ammunition', although a popular song soon had it as 'Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition'. The SS maintained a legal department throughout the war, and once of its officials, following the trail of dental gold removed from concentration-camp victims, successfully prosecuted an SS colonel for corruption: the officer was executed by the Germans shortly before the war ended.
As the work progressed I realised that the great virtue of the material lay not in its narrative detail but in its impressionistic quality, and that I could deal with the chronology by using a short commentary at the beginning of each chapter. In a sense the whole anthology, not just the last chapter, is about the experience of war. I have included some purely factual excerpts that add significantly to the written record, but overall I have followed the flow of the material and selected for vividness and human interest.
These recordings were made at a point almost exactly midway between the Second World War and our own times, and I quickly became aware that the interviews reflected an assumption of common knowledge about the events that they described. This assumption was probably rather tenuous even when the interviews were conducted and now has no basis whatever. Britain is, for better or for worse, a demilitarised society, and most of my own countrymen are unlikely to grasp the difference between a brigadier and a bombardier. We are de-historicised too. This is not the place to embark upon a tirade against the teaching of history in British schools, part of the 'commodification of education' that has betrayed so many children. Suffice it to say that there has not been a time since 1945 that school-leavers have had a poorer understanding of even the recent past. I have always believed that failure to study history properly means that the events of the past tend blithely to be forgotten or perversely misinterpreted, sadly, by politicians just as much as by school-leavers. Just as a individual's loss of memory is one of the most tragic disabling consequences of some cruel diseases, so our own loss of the collective memory furnished by history is scarcely less damaging for society as a whole.
The World at War was first shown at the height of the Cold War in 1973–74 and the decisions made by some of the writers and producers reflected the fact that their own political views, and the prevailing attitudes on the era in which they worked, sometimes coloured their work. That is a risk with any process that involves editorial selection, and I make no claim to be immune from it myself. It is easy to deconstruct their handiwork today, for we have the opportunity to watch it repeatedly on DVD, and certainly the occasional bias was less obvious when the series was first broadcast. Research was never a simple task for producers and directors working in the early 1970s. The fact that the Cold War was at its most chilly made it difficult for the series to dig deeply in Russia, and the researchers working on those episodes dealing with the Eastern Front were unable to conduct the interviews that would have told the true and heroic story of the Russian war effort. The first-hand material that makes Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War (2005) such a triumphant success was just not available to them but some Stalinist propaganda footage did indeed make the final cut.
Ideological bias aside – and in justice it really is confined to a few episodes in an otherwise commendably even-handed series – I still found it difficult to balance this anthology. There was a bare minimum of interviews for some topics, most notably the Eastern Front, but the wildest embarrassment of riches for others, notably the Battle of the Atlantic, D-Day in Normandy, the Pacific War and the Holocaust. The Atlantic and the Pacific wars break down quite tidily into three and two periods respectively, but the D-Day and Holocaust chapters involved me in painful editorial choices because I had to select so little from so much. Even so the Holocaust chapter is much the longest, and would have been even longer still were it not for the dreadful sameness in the details of what happens when society tips over the rim of the crater into hell. I have placed it at the half-way point of the book, immediately after the chapter on the development of area bombing. This is not to suggest any moral equivalence, for one, terrible though it was, was an act of war and the other had no conceivable military justification, but to emphasise that the signature feature of the Second World War was the literally unimaginable civilian death-toll. Our minds may not shrink from it, but they are simply unable to encompass it.
I hope that this book will move some literally irreplaceable oral history into the written record, and so a word on methodology is appropriate. This book is based on the transcripts of interviews made for The World at War. A very pertinent lecture on visual history, given on 7 September 2003 at the Cambridge History Festival, observed that transcripts do not always conform accurately to the original tapes. The sheer physical labour and concomitant expense (the same talk estimated the cost of 'cleaning up' the transcripts of Sir Jeremy Isaacs's Cold War series to be £250,000) meant that I worked from the written record, using taped interviews only when there was an unresolved problem with sense. I have tried to behave responsibly with the evidence, and have not conflated different interviews by the same subject into the same piece of text. Maryam Philpott, whose skills as a researcher have been honed on some of my previous projects, had the onerous task of converting some of the typescript to computer disc, so that the material could be more easily edited. My old friend Hugh Bicheno widened the assault, and he and I then carved up the project between us. I could not have hoped to succeed without his industry, eye for detail and great good sense. There are only a few occasions when I exercised what I might call a casting vote, and the responsibility for the finished product is mine alone.
Interviewees are given a brief description, generally on the first occasion on which they appear in a given chapter. In a few cases the original transcripts give precious little detail, omitting first names or accurate unit designations, and there is often nothing I have been able to do to remedy the deficiency. In many others, individuals were steadily promoted during and sometimes after the war. Anthony Eden was first knighted and later created Earl of Avon, while that little tiger of a general, John Harding, began the war as a lieutenant colonel and ended it as a lieutenant general, becoming a field marshal and a peer after it. I include a list of dramatis personae that will help readers trace the careers of the most significant interviewees, and throughout I have tried (not, I fear, with complete success) to give individuals the rank or appointment they held at the time to which the quotation refers. I have translated foreign ranks, where possible, into the nearest British equivalent. Purists will rightly object to 'SS Colonel' rather than 'SS-Standartenführer', and will observe that a German Leutnant often enjoyed responsibilities denied to a British second lieutenant, but it is the stories that these individuals tell that matter to us, not the braid that they wore. It is a sad reflection that I know least about those interviewees who often felt the sharpest edge of war – like those Americans who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.
My abiding memory of a project that has claimed the best part of a year of my working life is of the sheer scale of The World, at War and its triumphant and enduring success. I doubt if we shall ever see something of this epic dimension carried off with such panache again. In my lifetime television may have gained much in terms of technology, but it has lost at least as much in terms of scale, vision and courage. In a small way this series changed the way that I personally looked at history, and in a broader sense it changed television's relationship with the past. These transcripts, lying in the dusty darkness for half my lifetime, have something fresh to say about this war that shaped the world in which I grew up, and whose long shadow is, even now, only beginning to recede.