Antony Beevor, Author, "The Second World War"

this week on Q&A noted historian Anthony beaver discusses his newly released historical narrative titled the second world war Anthony beaver author of the second world war when you first started thinking about doing this book what was your objective it was rather embarrassing in a way it was partly because in the past I'd always focused on particular battles whether Stalingrad Berlin d-day Crete and so forth and I realized that I just did not understand enough about the whole conflict fitted together and I think it was terribly important really to acknowledge that and now for term understanding for myself because the duty the historian really is is to understand and then to try to convey that understanding and the way that for example war in the Pacific affected the war in Europe or the way that the war in Western Europe was affected by the fighting on the Soviet front one really does need to understand this global the truly global aspect of the conflict what kind of a military experience have you had I was a regular officer I went to Sandhurst quite a long time ago I was in a Cavalry Regiment which meant we had tanks in Germany during during the Cold War period patrolling the East German frontier and all that sort of stuff so it was a good preparation because I'm not trying to say that every military historian has to have served in the forces but I do think that it's important that one understands the mentality so many people think that an army is a cold mechanical organization it's actually an intensely emotional organization and I think one needs to do that there are some women his will at the military historians who've been brilliant in what they've produced but that's because they've really put themselves into the boots of soldiers and really understood what they were about rather than coming from the outside and trying to impose theories on the organization what is Sandhurst I will sound houses 200 west in fact we quite often did some joint exercises with with cadets from from West Point in the beginning of your book you say that 60 million people died in World War two can you break that down many will say that it's quite a lot more than 60 in fact when it comes to China the conservative figure for China is 20 million but there are some Chinese historians now arguing that it should be 40 million when you're looking at the Soviet Union 26 million is the generally accepted figure of those nine million military seventeen million civilian it was one of the first wars in history where the civilian casualty is completely completely outstripped the military casualties how did you start this story and when did the World War two start in your opinion well it's a very interesting debate because every country has their own opinion or their own views of the Second World War which is shaped by their experiences and that's become their memories for the United States the war began in December 1941 for the Russians for the Soviet Union it began in June 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union for most Europeans you think of September 1939 and the German invasion of Poland as the start but for the Chinese it started in 1937 with the with the Japanese the sino-japanese war so there are many of many different versions but I think the important thing to understand really about the Second World War was that it wasn't just a conglomeration of conflicts there were the state on state the nation the Britain the great powers fighting each other but also one has to remember there was an element of international civil war and it was wrought largely this international Civil War the split throughout the world almost between fascism and communism which led to the civil wars after the Second World War the Greek Civil War the Chinese Civil War and then ultimately to Korea and Vietnam I'm going to show you some video it was done by the American War Department Frank Capra was the director this is just short to give us kind of a sense of peace his watch the pagan pageantry the district leaders from all over Germany swore personal allegiance to him hypnotized that they were members of a master race this film will deal with act one that the Nazi bid for world power the most fantastic play in all recorded history Hitler had seen Hirohito grab off Manchuria and other territory from the Chinese he had watched Mussolini get away with the rape of Ethiopia he had seen the Democratic world look the other way while these illegal aggressions were going on and he smiled for collective action to enforce peace the only weapon he had to fear had broken down it was time now for the Nazis to stop crossing borders it was time for Hitler to put his plan into action you write on page 746 I'm gonna jump to the end he screamed and yelled in fury during the midday situation conference then collapsed weeping in a chair a little bit different image of Adolf Hitler than we saw there yes where was this well what happened at the end Hitler had been defying a reality he was in in total denial psychologically the were moments when I think that he realized by 1944 95 that the war was going to end in Berlin but at this particular stage when he bursts into tears and collapses I think he realizes that what he has done is to have brought the whole of Germany to destruction but he didn't regret that because he in his sort of social Darwinian obsession that somehow though they it was right for the strong to win he even said that the German people have not proved themselves strong enough power now belongs to the Soviets because in fact they have proved stronger and a conquered Nazi Germany so one sees an appalling perversity that he was prepared to bring the whole of his own people down with him in a collective suicide because he was determined himself to die where was he at the end and what he ate was it oh well this was this was in Berlin in April as the Russians actually advanced in on the city having survived 19 1945 sorry yes and and what were the exact circumstances at the end of his life the last couple of days well there was a strong element of if you like black comedy grotesque farce there was Hitler still trying to order armies which no longer existed to country to come to Berlin to save him in fact the remnants of those armies were trying to escape to the American lines so that they would not be sent in to say Viet labor camps in Siberia and he was still sort of ranting and screaming about the the Jews and the way that they had brought the war upon the world this was this complete reversal of cause and effect which was characteristic of Hitler and also characteristic of the German extreme right and he in those sort of lasts that very last day and so he married Ava Brown finally partly because she had insisted on dying with him and staying to die with hitmen so this was sort of in way her reward but he also saw he was someday like Stalin he was fascinated by movies by the cinema and you think in some ways that he saw himself as sort of war mr. a worldwide film director directing this script and he didn't want to fly out to Berlin to die in baptists garden in his sort of alpine retreat because for him the goethe Dameron the the downfall should come in Berlin that would make a more dramatic end to his whole life how long had he been with Ava Braun before and where did they actually get married well they were actually married in the bunker this is the bunker underneath the Reich's Chancellery in Berlin one feels almost slightly sorry for the official who has suddenly dragged in from his Volkssturm which is a militia battalion defending the city an order to come in to marry Hitler and ever and I had to ask of them if they were free of hereditary diseases and were they of Aryan birth which must've been slightly intimidating asking Hitler that I suppose at that particular moment but it was part of the Nazi wedding ceremony and then they had this sort of strange little reception but upstairs in the rights Chancellery there were scenes of sort of frankly of drunken orgy and and all the rest of it complete dissertation so what is has been done with that bunker today well the bunker then the Russians tried to blow it up because it was in the soviet-occupied zone but the with five meters of concrete which was covering the roof any other part of it collapsed so they just covered it over and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the West German government felt that they should start do something with that particular area and they were going to excavate and they suddenly realized that in fact the bunker was still there under the ground and they were terrified that it will become a shrine to neo-nazis so it was rapidly covered over again and it's now sort of I think sort of camouflage as a as a park but I remember climbing it climbing up the Palisades to have a have a look in at that particular moment when when when it was briefly exposed I mean that was only really a bit of concrete and so forth so you didn't see inside no no no couldn't get who couldn't get inside I have heard one or two people claim that they got into the bunker through a tunnel from one of the canals that there was an escape tunnel but I'm sorry dubious about these stories you write about that time period when the end was coming for people who had also lived in Berlin and who was heading toward the city at they at the end there in 1945 well in 1945 you had in the West you had basically the British in the north and the Canadians in the north and then opposite Berlin all the way down the river a river Elbe you had the American different American armies particular the 9th Army and that was when Eisenhower gave the order to halt as the Russians the the various the Soviet Belarusian first Belarusian front and second Belarusian front and 1st Ukrainian front in a massive operation were inserting Berlin and the interesting thing about that which we discovered in the Soviet archives and Russian archives was that the reason why Stalin was so insistent on surrounding Berlin first was he was terrified that the Americans were going to break through he wanted to get the nuclear material and also the nuclear scientists who were in Berlin at that particular time because he wanted them for operation Borodino which was the soviet attempt to create nuclear weapons because he knew from his own spies about the Manhattan Project in the United States and the creation of the atomic bombs that was going ahead here in the United States so go back to the moment that Adolf Hitler was getting near the end who was then the bunker with him and what was his plan Hitler by then had virtually no plan I mean when when you realized that these armies or remnants of armies were not coming to his aid but we're trying to escape really to the West that's when he collapsed when he felt he realized finally that it would have come to an end and it was only a question of suicide his main objective was simply not to be captured alive by the Russians he was afraid of being paraded through Moscow in a cage and being spat out and ridiculed and all the rest of it so he was determined to die and ever Braun was determined to die it died with him and in the bunker and I suspect I've spoken and interviewed some of the people who were there in the bunker with him there were various generals and others some were allowed to escape and some certainly did escape others had to wait until Hitler himself had killed killed himself and ever brown and then also had to wait until gurbles of the minister of the propaganda minister had killed his children and his wife and in a sort of suicide mass suicide and then they tried to escape through the Russian lines some of them made it any a very few but others were caught and shot down or committed suicide before they were captured who was there that you were able to talk to well one person who was an extremely reliable witness was in fact the chief of staff to general Krebs who was the commander-in-chief and German chief the General Staff and this was a general fight - roaring - and I must say his accounts are also General de mazia who in fact was visiting frequently but I also interviewed Hitler's teléfonos - was an SS teléfonos called Rochus Misch and it was an extraordinary experience sitting in his parlor in Berlin drinking tea as he showed us his photograph albums which were basically which he'd taken himself of Hitler playing with his Alsatian with his shepherd dog German Shepherd blondie and things like that as if and he she was showing the cyst so proudly you know like his holiday snaps but Rochus Misch was there when Hitler's body was carried past to be set on fire up in the Reich's Chancellery garden along with the body of Fr Brown and he recounted to us how one of the SS guards had been getting very drunk upstairs they were drinking up the last of the alcohol before the Russians arrived staggered down the stairs and shouted out to him hey the chief ssam far do you want to come and have a look I mean it for me that this sort of summed up that this grotesque ending of such an appalling regime specifically had and he kill himself and how did she die they Hitler she took as she took poison they all had the same set of cyanide capsules and Hitler also had a small pistol and basically he'd crunched into the cyanide pistol I was saying - the cyanide capsule and then shot himself as well to make doubly sure why didn't she shoot herself she did not want to disfigure herself even in death she was rather vain you know one of the things that I saw here and I know it's been done before but it's her first time I've ever seen her referred to as Ava Hitler yes did you do that on purpose no she insisted on it I mean when the servants sort of forgetting that they're about the Menten wedding ceremony referred to her as far lime brown she immediately a curriculum no no no how if Hitler and she in fact it was quite interesting when she signed when she signed the winning the marriage register you can actually see the way she signed ever be and she had started with the B of brown and then crossed that out and then written Hitler is there anything new in the book yes I think there was quite a business new give us an idea where the kind of things that you've discovered as you learn about this I think one of the major elements which was this was material which was sort of passed on to me after my book on Stalingrad and quite often what happens is you finish a book and then suddenly lots of interesting material arrives and professor Rajesh Nevsky who was the had a mission whom headed the Second World War historians association in Moscow passed me a lot of material especially from the KGB archives or the old FSM the old NKVD about Stalingrad but also the material came out about operation Mars now when they surrounded Stalingrad they had this huge diversion in the center of the front to tie down German forces there and what became clear was not only did they send six Soviet armies into the attack without really any artillery support pillar to tag them down they even betrayed the plans in advance to the Germans I mean this was one of the most cynical appalling ruthless acts in the whole history of warfare two hundred and fifteen thousand casualties as many umbrella as the Allies had in Normandy and d-day it combined and Stalin was prepared to sacrifice that just purely to make sure that the Stalingrad operation worked in them in their Far East I mean I think one of the things which shocked me the most was to discover that the Japanese had used cannibalism as an actual strategy the killing of prisoners and of locals but of prisoners of war as well and using them as human cattle just literally slaughtering them one by one for their meat and this was this was actually a strategy it was when they were ordered to adopt so-called self-sufficiency when they'd been cut off by the US Navy they didn't have any further supplies and it was also happening in China as well now when in 1945 during the investigations the Australian War Crimes Commission and the American authorities discovered this was the case they decided to suppress it in his State suppressed for a very very long time further very good reason that most families who'd had a relative who died in Japanese imprisonment would of course would be solid psychologically traumatized by wondering whether you know their relative had been killed for which is the same incident there you you referred to in General MacArthur's suppress the was either the prosecution of somebody and after the war yes he suppressed the execution of the officers involved in what was called unit 731 which was their biological and chemical warfare development site in Manchuria near Harbin and the point was that in exchange for all the information and I've read there were a lot of sort of should we say very dubious deals done at the end of the war whether with German rocket scientists or with the Japanese scientists involved in these appalling experiments on prisoners then they were they escaped prosecution and some of them were actually sort of brought to the United States and used for their knowledge this is an 850 page book there's an enormous amount of battles and names and inner howdy how did you do this I'm sure he's hit with a certain amount of difficulty and a good deal of panic in the early stage when did it start oh I mean and in a way it's been an accumulation of material for ever quite a long period of time but when I actually started on it was were about three three and a half years ago it was a very difficult one I mean the vital thing really was suppression of structure and then the marshaling of the material and once it started to fall into place then if you like my panic started to subside but up until that point it was a sort of worrying thing of whether I'd sort of taken on too much because I mean you were just simply overloaded overwhelmed drowning or missed in the quantity of material in detail 50 chapters yes why did you decide to lay it out to where you did and how would you describe the way you laid it out well I always believed in in a narrative history because I think one needs to have that chronological order rather than if you like a thematic construction or a where you might have say part of the book about the Pacific War part of the book about the war in Europe or something like that I do believe that it needs to be in in chronological order as a narrative not just from a point of view that it's easier to understand if like it's a story but also that that is the way that you can show the effects of one theater upon another at critical moments and really a major changes in the course of the war but I mean narrative history thank God is an Saxon tradition going all the way back to his of givin in the 18th century and all the rest of it it's totally different to the German version of history which has always been very much more their idea that scientific well the history can only be a branch of literature I cannot be tested in a laboratory and I didn't believe in this notion of scientific history but give us the atmosphere that you would have we would have found you and give us the the back that set up the were you right and and how you would go about putting all this information on paper well I was having huge help again as usual from my sort of colleagues who I've worked with me for many many years I mean Luba Vinogradova Who I am wet with now for 17 years and she knows exactly the sort of material that I'm looking for and all the rest of it in the in the Russian archive say she was providing with material from that direction and from Germany and yellow car von hase who I've worked with for a very long time was also doing that so when that material would arrive obviously they would all be in different files and then I could copy it across to the skeleton chapters I mean to begin with actually there were nearly 60 skeleton chapters so I gradually sort of eased them down or whatever you're never really gonna know how it's going to work out I mean sometimes you get so much material from the archives I remember even on the Berlin book that are on one chapter I had 110 pages of notes just for one chapter and this was from the archives alone let alone the books so you know this is where you have to do your triage of information of material and what you drop out and put into if you like into a reserve chapter and then you can go back later and check if there's anything very important that you have removed and maybe you should go back in but it's the only way when you think of the old days women had to work with card-index systems and you know typing it out on electric typewriter and feted copying and all the rest of it I thank God for the computer I mean I didn't think a book like that would have never taken two years at least longer where were you physically located to write the book well this is in in in England in Dan and the countryside near near Canterbury I've got I've got a barn which I've sort of convert into a library which has got sort of books all the way around and the important and piece of equipment is a ping-pong table because for spreading out the maps and also for the piles of photocopies from all the different archives because otherwise into smaller room one would descend into chaos and when when you write what time of day do you do it and on what Oh on a on a laptop and you know I'll start I'll start as soon as I can usually 8:30 and usually by 8:30 or 9:00 and I'll carry on I mean it'll be a break during the day I'll have to get and have a walk or something like that you can't sit there for all that time and then I'll carry on until usually it's about sort of 7:30 quarter to 8:00 in the evening how do you do research do you do that all first and then write or do you do it as you go ideally yes I mean I think that those Hemingway and Gabriel Garcia Marquez sort of base argued that you should spend sort of several months on the first paragraph and then the whole book will write themselves I'm not suggesting that's necessarily the case here always in the past I always felt very strongly that you shouldn't start to write until you'd finished all of your research but I realized on this book I mean you know that I would be simply overwhelmed by the materials that I did need to change my method and start writing on a at an earlier stage and you know once it once it gets going it is vital to establish I think what your your voice your rhythm and everything in that sort of early part you don't get the early part of the book right I don't think you're ever gonna really gonna get it right you can go back and you can you keep rewriting the start but I didn't think you'll you won't get that that rhythm and the voice which you need go back to the beginning of the moment this is a piece of video and I want your assessment of how important this this thing that we'll see happening yes the leaders of France and Britain desperately striving to avoid war flu to meet the juban axis leaders of meaning September 29 in return for Hitler's guarantee of world peace Chamberlain and elachi prevailed upon Czechoslovakia to give up the Sudetenland without effect in Czechoslovakia the Munich pact was greeted by alliance of protest but the lad you returned to plans to be greeted by cheers from a relief French people in Britain a happy Kimberlin came back to he achieved peace peace in our time one of the most tragic and ironic scenes in all history good morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor here Hitler and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine we regard the agreement sang last night then the anger German naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again how many people at that time from Mears research did not believe what Chamberlain was telling them I'm afraid the vast majority did believe it and that was true of France as well what were nice to remember is that both countries and particularly France which it had such grievous losses in the First World War couldn't really believe that any other country would want to repeat the horrors of the First World War they completely misunderstood Hitler and in fact the determination of many German people to if like correct the mistake of 1918 of the German defeat and the attitude of the Germans that they have not really been defeated it was ended by a trick and I think one of the common elements between if you like 1938 and today and the euro crisis is that the populations of Western Europe were severely misinformed by their leaders and by their press on what the real threat was and that's certainly true today I didn't think that leaders in Europe had can actually tell their populations their countries quite how desperate things are because otherwise they're the dangers the acceleration and panic would be even worse the one difference between the two of course is that the threat of war tends to unify nation the threat of economic collapses that much more divisive but in 1938 what I think is significant is there was a minority of there was Chacho Eden etaf Cooper various others who warning very clearly what the threat was but they were treated as as Cassandra's as or as war mongers even and I think it's significant that Churchill could not come to power until after the war started and in fact he didn't arrive in power until May the 10th 1940 which we happened to be the very day that the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries of Holland Belgium and also a France sedating LAN is where sedate inland is the the if you like the most western part of the Czechoslovakia and in fact was sort of rather like that people refer to it as a cigar stuck in the mouth Germany and there were a lot of a large sort of German population there I mean one has to remember that particular time how many Germans there were spread around different parts of Europe who've been in under the sort of the the Empire's the the German Empire but also of course the austro-hungarian Empire and that's been part of the austro-hungarian Empire and Hitler's argument at the time of course was that I want to bring the Germans back within the right and many people thought well you know he's only trying to get the Germans back and that said they had a certain sympathy or reliefs they weren't prepared necessary to fight over that and it seemed to be a small price to pay for world peace that was one of the reasons but in fact as was shown very soon afterwards when Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia the following march in 19 March 1939 he was not just interested in just getting the Germans back he was actually interested in seizing the territory of other countries why do you think Chamberlain thought he was going to live up to the signature on that piece of paper well as stuff Cooper said of Chamberlain you know as Lord Mayor of Birmingham which had been his sort of previous position and nobody had ever broken their word to mr. Chamberlain and he could not imagine Hitler breaking his word he was very naive in that particular way he was a very good chancellor of the exchequer he'd done many good jobs but he was as one could see from if you like the wing collar and the Edwardian moustache and a rail Dam Briella typically unable to face up to the gleaming ruthlessness of the Nazi regime by the way if you had to pick one human being out of this book that you've written that you could write a book about who would it be well I had to through there's a cost of thousands or my first choice well too many people have already written about Churchill I wouldn't actually therefore attempt to do that and not in many ways also I didn't sort of see myself necessarily as a biographer of that particular period I know I've always been fascinated by Eisenhower about bethi's his qualities and and his certain one or two of his weaknesses as well pattern is a fascinating character and obviously that's again a sort of a huge temptation that one sees these sort of various limitations on leaders of that particular time but I've always been rather struck by the way that many of these commanders particularly on the Allied side not on them are in the armies of the totalitarian regimes but the Allied commanders had spent most of their military life in complete isolation and anonymity never you never heard of them and suddenly they became film stars virtually with journalists and newsreel cameras and unable to report any of the military details because of security and secrecy so they could only really face focus and make sort of personality cult of these commanders and now most of them sort of such as Nimitz and others were much too modest and in fact remarkable commanders were undertaken unfazed by that but one or two I mean certainly MacArthur and to a certain degree Patton and I'm afraid above all Montgomery sort of almost did see themselves as film stars or presidential candidates in in this sort of new role and I think that the vanity was the inflated with dangerous to a dangerous one small question you say that Montgomery actually had photographs of himself that he would sign and pass out yes absolute them well I'm sure a lot of people did I mean he one has to remember that Britain was rather short of military heroes at that particular time ticking the senior ranks I mean you know the generalship in the early part of the war had been distinctly unimpressive so as soon as Montgomery had won the Battle of Alamein largely through very good preparation rather than through tactical brilliance during the battle you know he did become a hero and we were desperate for that sort of hero I suppose at the time and Montgomery actually became almost fatuous in the way that he was carried away by his his self-image at that particular time but you're a little bit of a scene in the book where you compare Montgomery with Mark Clark our general and with your general I guess I just never seen before I didn't know Montgomery was that short yes and that Clark was that tall oh yes yes what was their relationship well should we say one certainly on the clock side one of intense jealousy Clark was absolutely obsessed with the idea of capturing Rome before the British and in fact his even his own staff officers were really rather dubious about this sort of obsession in fact they refer to the way that he had made sure that his truly imperial profile was photographed by the from the right side by all the correspondence and they used to refer to him as Marcus Aurelius Clark us with his desire to capture Rome and he was intensely distrustful of Montgomery I think actually this particular case unnecessarily so anyway Montgomery then went back to Britain for the prepared preparations for d-day and Clark became even more obsessed even sort of threatened apparently too early in fact he even claimed it and I think in his own memoirs that he'd threatened the British with if they got to Rome first you would actually afar on them I mean I'm afraid sometimes and I think this is one of the few cases in the Second World War that sort of the charisma of leadership can actually psychologically unbalanced people how many books would you say you've had to have read in order to write this book yeah I mean you know one Scott but one lists in the bibliography but I mean in terms of the other ones a huge number I mean you know it's probably a several thousand but I mean you could you could go on reading all your life researching all your life and you never you'd never finish it completely let's go back to the beginning for some reason rather you picked one human being to lead your book off mmm-hmm a picture of a man who died in Illinois but he had quite a history who was he and what's the story well he was a young Korean at the age of 18 he was grabbed by the Japanese and forced into their army in Manchuria because career at that stage was a Japanese colony and his name was young gyeongjong and he was with the Japanese army when there was the the major clash with the Russians with the Red Army at Kalkan goal in August 1939 and I in fact use that for me is the start of the second war because the battle at Cal King Goll on this Mongolian Manchurian frontier was actually one of the most influential battles of the war it wasn't that large I mean you know we're in we're only talking about we're only talking about sort of you know sixty thousand men on one side in comparison to that the huge conflicts later on it was pretty small but it was very very influential in the way that it persuaded the Japanese not to try to fight the Soviet Union and to attack South which later led of course to Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya and so forth but anyway poor young was captured by the Russians at this particular battle at Cal King Goll put into a labor camp along with thousands of other prisoners of them Japanese army but then later at a moment of crisis in 1942 the Russians grabbed him and thousands of other prisoners and forced him into a red unit Red Army uniform to fight the Germans and he was then captured by the Germans in 43 at Kharkov and then the Germans later on put him into Vermont uniform and along with lots of other Russian prisoners he was forced to serve in what's called an oz bataillon an eastern battalion in normandy to defend not they atlantic wall and said come six of june 7th of june with the landing of the american paratroopers on the Cherbourg Peninsula he was captured then finally by the Americans take him back to England where he's put in a prison camp for a bit and then transferred to a prison camp in the United States so having been all the way around the world he actually then settled in the United States after he was released at the end of the war and died in Illinois in 1992 but the point really of the story is not just that he emphasizes the global aspect of the war but it shows how for most people they had no control over their own fate Wow where did you find it though when and when did you decide to open your book with it well I when I saw the photograph and I came across the account and I'd sort of tried to double-check it as far as I could the reason why I grabbed my imagination so much was that my father was in fact the in charge of commanded Special Operations Executive in Italy which was our equivalent of OSS and he had always turned me and I remember this story as a child how a German soldier but in fact of Asian origin or looks had been captured by the British and nobody could find out where he came from because he couldn't they couldn't find what language he spoke and finally there was a an English cheat their priest who had been attached to one of the a chaplain attached to one of the divisions who had been a missionary in India and he spoke to him in Tibetan and this man collapsed in tears it was the first time he'd heard his language in three years and apparently he'd been picked up by a Soviet Border Patrol you know on the edge of Tibet and grabbed and pushed into the Red Army said having heard that story as a child and then when I came across this particular story it had a huge resonance for me a couple of quick things where did most of the fighting I mean just divided that between the East and the West well where do the most people get killed I think without any doubt on the Eastern Front particularly what one could describe I mean the borderlands of Poland below Russia the Baltic States the Ukraine there is no doubt that that is where the bulk were killed both in the prison camps the death camps but also of Soviet prisoners starved to death who've been captured by the Germans I mean when you're talking about these sort of huge numbers of figures there is no doubt that the back of the fur marked was actually broken on the Eastern Front the the West made major contributions in terms of lend-lease so it made a vast contribution if you like to the Soviet victory but there's no doubt that in fact he was the Soviet Union which broke Germany's power where did the Americans lose the most people in the Pacific or in it over in the Atlantic on the whole you can't really sort of say that it was it was under casualties in the final year started to mount up pretty and in a pretty large way in Europe but I mean the casualties in the Pacific on the whole whether heavier your British the American people from your perspective how did the Americans do in the in World War two well the Americans made the huge contribution not just in question of the human sacrifice and the Far East with the Marines and the army there and particularly in North Africa and above all in d-day and in the fighting in northwest Europe but the industrial contribution was simply staggering I mean one of my favorite quotes which I put in the book is the American general who said that the the US Army does not solve its problems it overwhelms them and I thought that the way that that Illustrated this sort of cornucopia of Tanks aircrafts Liberty ships all rolling off production lines I mean it was one of the most astonishing achievements in human history and there's no doubt about it I mean the reason why the Russians got to Berlin before the Americans was quite simply the fact that it was American Dodge Studebaker Chevrolet's and all the trucks that have been given to the Soviet Union under lend-lease and had made the advances in 43 and appeared specially in 44 possible they'd never have got anywhere near it that's not very popular when you told Russian historians where were we weak I think I I think that the the weakness was only right at the beginning if you like inevitably like every army entering a war particular it's a civilian army basically which was had been swollen I mean one has to remember the size of the American army of going going from sort of you know little more than one hundred thousand up to up to eight million I mean that was one of the astonishing achievements under general Marshall and of course it was going to be a weakness at the beginning you know until you actually been bloodied in battle and all the rest of it but where I think that the I mean the British were very arrogant in the way of referring to the Americans as green troops and and so forth but in fact my god then the Americans took learnt the let their lessons very very quickly Churchill used to make a joke saying you know the Americans always do the right thing in the end having tried everything else for beforehand which I think was slightly unfair because in Americans as I say learnt very fast and learned quickly more quickly on the job I think than the British did this is again out of context but it's near the end and I it jumped out this is nothing new for us to hear but it's rather precise Roosevelt looking old and frail mm-hmm with his mouth hanging open most of the time sometimes did not appear to follow what was going on you're talking about Yalta yes how serious was that and did he make a mistake or did we as a country make a mistake having him there at that table well the whole state of Roosevelt's health was of course kept completely secret and it was very hard for Bruce results associates and companions basically to say mr. president are you sure you're up to it he was desperate to be there and the trouble was he was desperate because his great obsession was to leave a legacy of of peace in the post-war world and he thought he could do a deal with startin that he could charm Stalin into supporting his project to the United Nations and that was the thing dearest to his heart in a way I think the the huge mistake was that he completely underestimated the ruthlessness of Stalin and Stalin's total contempt for any democratic idea or ideal and especially over Poland and this is where Churchill became increasingly horrified of the fact that it Yalta Roosevelt announced that he was going to withdraw all the American troops in in Europe which of course was absolutely music to Stalin's ears and in fact Churchill we it was even at one stage just after the war ended even contemplating the idea that somehow we should push the Russians back to force them to behave over Poland in what what was called Operation unthinkable but I think that it was one of the great dangers I think that the the main failing of Roosevelt was a belief an excessive belief in his own charm and ability to win Stalin round to his way of thinking Stalin wasn't going to be won round by anybody I don't know that this is a relevant question but who was were Stalin or Hitler it's a great I wait let me ask it this way Stalin Hitler Mao ah well I think one of the more interesting mut remarks was that of Andrei Sakharov the great scientists and physicists and dissident and he said although and this was in reference to those two of Stalin the Hitler said all those Stalin killed more people than Hitler you know Hitler still had to be defeated first and I think that's absolutely true because if Hitler had won in the Soviet Union the the deaths I mean the ponga plan alone counted on 30 million Russians dying of starvation I mean it would have dwarfism in the Holocaust in the case of Mao yes I mean you know but it's again a question of figures I mean 60 million however many Chinese died and as many as almost the whole of the Second World War in those famines you know after the war this is after the war obviously there especially during you know the Great Leap Forward and later in the Cultural Revolution and so forth I mean that was it was a madness of the most terrifying terrifying form but you know do how does one calculate these sort of figures of death through famine or disease as a result of malnutrition you know it's very very hard to start sort of defining these figures and categorizing trying to find the quote of course I can't fasten them but there was a quote in here that people might be surprised about and that would be were you quote Teddy white who was such a prominent figure in this country in the 60s when he wrote about the elections yes buying the mouth as a successor to Chiang kai-shek as being a better deal hmm I'm afraid the laws say there's a lot of should we say New Deal idealism and I think that certainly more and more historians now are accepting that in fact Chiang kai-shek has had rather a bad deal in history he had an impossible situation yes there was a lot of corruption within his own organization all the rest of it but when you see what Mao did later the witch hunts of any opponent the killings the the humiliation and destruction of almost anybody whom who might be Satya opposed mouths personal command I mean it wasn't question of being anti-communist it was a question of unless you absolutely bowed down to mouths that dot as a god you know you were regarded as an enemy and this was madness frankly but it was terrifying that so many people were able to vow by the storia which the Communists were this Chinese Communists were putting out at the time that they were the ones fighting the Japanese and the Nationalists were doing nothing this is totally untrue Mao is very careful and was giving orders the whole tartan to his troops you know don't take on the Japanese we need to keep our weapons and our ammunition ready 8 destroy the Nationalists in the civil war that will follow inevitably which will follow the Second World War I want to show you some video of a man you know and then ask you about him he we've gotten to know him a little bit here this is back in 2003 mm-hmm I think Hitler's real mistake if he wanted to win was not two of organised planned and organized his his scientific program better than he did Germany made was enormous is successful in the development of critical military technology between well 1936 Sam and 1944 by 1944 the Germans had the following technological achievements to their credit they had built and flown the first helicopter they had built and flare in the first jet aircraft and they had built and flown in the first cruise missile and they had built and flown the first extra atmospheric missile v2 but all these weapons were either not fully developed or would came too late into production what what impacted sir John Keegan have on your life a great deal I studied military history under him at Sandhurst where he was he was a wonderful influence in the way that he was provocative in the sense he made us think of things from a totally outside different angle whether role as an officer and a future officer and all the rest of it but we all every military historian has drawn a huge debt really on his first major import his first book really his important book which was the face of battle and this was the first time that military history had been looked at if you like from below rather than in the collective version of history in the past where you know generals and staff officers had tried to impose a an order which had never existed on the battlefield and made it sound as if military commanders were somehow sort of chess grandmasters and this was totally misleading and John turned that upside down and so as a result we've always been in his debt whereas he today he is at home in Wiltshire Cummington he's not well I'm afraid he's mainly bed Britta's bed bedridden in fact and incredibly bet brave I mean I'm afraid he's always suffered very badly from bad health and all the rest of it all this all of his life but it's been it's been particularly cruel in in recent years we couldn't tell her looking there but he had it a terrible handicap was one of his legs that's remember was that was it polio I can't write it what from from from from child childhood yes and in a way that was always what I think what it he did he been fascinated as a small boy at the time of d-day and when he saw all the troops assembling and all the rest of it and he knew that he would never be able to go with them but one of the reasons why he was such a good military historian was that although he could never obviously serve in the army he was fascinated by the role the problems of the military and his sympathy for soldiers and anybody involved in warfare came through really his sympathetic imagination so if you had a room full of young students who wanted to do what you've done what would you start about being a historian I think that as I said that the first rule of the historian is to understand he does not to make moral judgments that should be left at the reader you don't go into an archive already if you go into an archive with fixed ideas the best thing that can happen to you is to find that those fixed ideas particularly wrong because then it means you're actually discovering something new or something interesting I'm as I said very opposed to sort of the German idea that you should have a thesis and then you should support it with the materials that means actually or selecting the material to suit your own particular prejudice or your own particular argument and the vital thing is to try to keep your mind as open as possible and you know you're never going to get it entirely right nobody can no book is have a definitive it in you there's always going to be more material to come in the future but I think the you've just got to make the best the best work and the best effort the what was the first thing you ever successfully wrote well it depends on the degree of success but I suppose the one which really broke broke out in a way was with Stalingrad I mean there being on one or two books before which had done fairly well but Stalingrad was the one which sort of went sort of international and translated into 30 languages or more than say fourth what year that was in 1998 and what entry knew about Stalingrad to make a book out of it well the reason really was that the Russian archives had just opened and I'd already worked there on another book about Paris after the liberation and the whole point of Stalingrad was that we knew more or less the military story the the strata strategic the tactical story even we had very little idea of what it was really like for the soldiers on the ground at the time and the civilians caught up in the city trapped the children even you know living the orphans living almost like animals off roots and on plants to survive I mean I couldn't believe it that 1,000 of them was still alive in the city after five months of battle but it was the ability although a Puffs potential a possibility of actually getting at those archive in the Ministry of Defense archives out at products just south of Moscow and that was really where the the vital material they I think those are Christ clothes now yes number four it said it was my fault I felt this happened like I mean we I've heard a number of American historian say the same thing who why did they close him it was it was quite interesting the way they were opened peak oil was the minister of the archives and for under Yeltsin already forced the military into a in their archives they were never happy about opening those archives and they were very uneasy because they never dealt with foreign historians before and there was the mixture of sort of paranoia and naivety among most sort of dealing with those archives a time I mean I remember the colonel in charge at the General Staff in the minister of defense in Moscow saying saying to me we have a simple rule in our archive you'll tell us the subject we choose the files there was no point trying to say well that's not how it works in other archives and you one just had to try and do ones best and in fact we were very very lucky indeed but the the closing down came in fact it was before my Berlin book came out it was actually as soon after we'd finished the research and in fact by that stage the FSB the old KGB was actually checking on all the material taken up by foreign historians that started become completely paranoid and by it was I think you just after 2000 that they closed but also to foreign the foreign researchers your former teacher has an opinion of what could have happened in world war two I want to run that and then see what what do you think had he developed a nuclear weapon and had either the the cruise missile the v1 all the the rocky at the v2 in production early enough he would have won the war he would have bombarded London he would have bombarded the the invasion ports the d-day couldn't have taken place he would have just destroyed the American armies in Britain and having done so he he could have dictated his own terms eventually I suppose the Americans would have brought their only nuclear weapons to the practical stage as they did indeed in 1945 and they would probably be in a contra bombardment of your with nuclear weapons by the Americans but that would have been too late Hitler would have would have frustrated the Allies efforts to win the war by conventional means did Hitler try to build nuclear war a bomb well interestingly Hitler doesn't seem to be terribly interested in it and I'm one of them bizarre developments the German nuclear scientist though had also made one major mathematical mistake from what I can understand which seems to have been that they completely misinterpreted or miss Esther mated what the critical mass would need to be to create the bomb and as far as they could work out to that particular stage that even if they had the right uranium and all the rest of it the bomb would need to be almost the size of a house and therefore would not be deliverable in any in any form the American British another scientist working at Manhattan Project in fact had actually worked out that this was not necessary but it was one of the great worries but I mean John Keaton was right of course if if they had made the bomb and they had the delivery systems you know he hit I'm sure wouldn't have been at all averse to destroying Britain in form of revenge particularly after the strategic bombing campaign and on Germany which had so angered and exasperated at stages he wanted to use gas but his generals persuaded him against it one of the things one must always remember is that the prevailing wind in Europe is a westerly and I quote most of it would have been blown back on to the German troops if they'd used it against the Allied troops we only have a very short minutes or so looking at Germany today I know a lot of Germans came here and helped us build our weapons at the United States but looking then what do you see in Germany today and in context to what's going on in Europe I think that I'm I'm in a way worried for Germany because I don't think the Germans have realized to what degree their economy has been taken hostage by the debtor countries of the south and I think that you know the implications are are simply terrifying in that particular in that particular way I mean Germany I didn't think even with its astonishingly powerful economy is not in a position to basically bail out the whole of the rest of Europe and to have one bailout after another which actually buys virtually no time at all is not achieving anything last question Antony yes we have Anthony in the United States is it the same name well it's the same name but it's certainly in mines without an H curiously I've had different theories on the difference between the one with an H and without but usually I thought anyway I've always stayed without an agent is it pronounced Anthony yes yes no H not Anthony just Anthony yes no age anthony beaver next book the next book is going to be the winter of 1944 particularly including the Battle of the Bulge I'm fascinated by the German I state of mind and obsession a belief that somehow they might win something in this last desperate gamble the name of this book is the Second World War our guest has been anthony beaver thank you very much thank you very much indeed for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at QA or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 83,347

Rating: 4.7023253 out of 5

Keywords: q&a, C-SPAN, cspan, Antony Beevor, The Second World War, WWII, Hitler, Poland, 1939, 1945

Id: Q-FsZUxeqIE

Length: 59min 16sec (3556 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2012