Citizen Soldier: Never Forget: Antony Beevor w/ Rick Atkinson

the following is a production of the Pritzker military museum and library sponsored by plant Moran Rick Atkinson for a discussion with Antony beaver about the motivating factors that have led each of us to devote much of our life's work to the subject of military history a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society of literature and an authority on the history of World War two Britain's Antony beaver traces the roots of his life's work to his studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst where he was influenced by legendary military historian John Keegan building upon his academic pursuits beaver spent five years with the 11th hussars of the British Army before leaving the military to pursue a career in writing since then his work is focused on all aspects of military history but without glorifying war and beaver is most interested in the humanity of war working to illustrate the intensely emotional nature of armies something often overlooked best known for his writings on world war ii beaver has spent countless hours digging through dusty archives and pouring over forgotten records and his penchant for uncovering new information is apparent in bestsellers like the Second World War and Stalin crime for which he was granted rare access to Soviet World War two records a winner of numerous awards beaver recently earned the 2014 Pritzker literature award for lifetime achievement in military writing joining the ranks of three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson a reporter foreign correspondent and senior editor for 25 years at the Washington Post Atkinson is the best-selling author of the long grey line and more recently the liberation trilogy a series of acclaimed histories on world war ii it is scholars like beaver and Atkinson who have answered the highest calling of the military historian to not only document and preserve our history but to impart the profound perspective that the true lessons of the past lie in the evolution of human conflict and while our heroes should be honored and their deeds never forgotten the real challenge for world leaders and the rest of us is in learning to anticipate what might come next so you started your adult journey at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and you're a British Army officer for five years how do you think that that has informed writing military history I think it's been hugely useful because one needs to understand the mentality of armies I mean outsiders tend to see armies as cold clinical organizations in fact they're intensely emotional organizations and quite often you find when you get Outsiders coming particular in the academic world from cultural historians and others trying to get into what is actually a fairly controversial subject they tend to bring in an ideological grid from outside without actually making the effort ready to understand what it's like now I'm not trying to say that everybody who writes about military history should have been a soldier or anything like that what do you have to show I think and some have been some excellent women writers on the subject who've never had any military service who have shown a tremendous empathy and understanding and they try to get inside the minds and the boots if you like of the soldiers on the ground and why did you after five years decide that you weren't gonna make a career of it it was a complex thing actually was funny enough it was because I was sent to a really boring place in North Wales they were training soldiers actually for Northern Ireland at the time and I'd volunteer for the parachute squadron of the armoured Corps and they said oh no no no he got this other job for you and I'd loved it with the regiment I mean they were that was fantastic but this was at a time when the senior subalterns were sent away to do other jobs and I was so depressed in this particular place I thought why not try writing because my mother's side of the family had all been writers and say with the innocence and arrogance of youth I mean without any preparation or training in that particular way I started writing my first novel which thank God was never published not and my wife been allowed to read it but the point was that publishers fairly soon afterward said listen you know with your military training having studied under John Keegan at Sandhurst etc etc why didn't you write military so I was pushed in that direction so John Keegan one of the towering figures in our field the face of battle arguably the most influential book of military history ever written and up until then history had always been written in collective terms very much the history of an army or of a division or whatever it might be and John turned that upside down with the face of battle of actually looking at the experience of the soldiers in the front line did you ever contemplate being a journalist at some point I certainly certainly considered it and it was great Claire Hollingworth and was the first person to report the German invasion of Poland tried to get me into journalism in those days it was you know two packets of cigarettes a day and at least a bottle of whiskey for each journalist if you were going to be taken seriously and I don't know I sort of slightly horrified a little bit by that and I suppose in rather priggish way I thought I'll try and just be a writer an agenda military history tends to be in bad odor in the Academy if you're a young scholar it's difficult to get tenure it's difficult to make a career out of being a military historian then is it that way in Britain I think there's on the whole sort of rather I'm not gonna see it sort of pacifist attitude amongst in academia or certainly anti-militarist and in many ways it's regarded as sort of you know not a subject for a khadeem which i think is a big big mistake well I think it is because the classes on world war ii or the civil war in this country or war in general often tend to be oversubscribed the students are interested in it but I think my theory is that in fact history departments Dean ships and Humanities schools have been taken over what the Germans would call 68 they're imbued with the notion that if you're interested in military history you must like war and that's not a good thing but it's else is I think that's not a good thing for students who need to know need to understand our collective history of going to war well they've got to understand war in it's in all of its aspects if they're even going to start to criticize it or analyze it right when the Civil War historian Bruce Katyn in 1977 I think it was received the Presidential Medal of Freedom which is the highest civilian award in this country President Ford at the time said that Katyn in Ford's words made us hear the sounds of battle and made us cherish peace mm-hmm is that the highest calling for a military historian what is the military historians supposed to be doing well I think that any military historian who glorifies war it's basically not being truthful because they are avoiding what vasily grossman describes the brutal truth of war and i think that that is the responsibility of the military historian which is the brutal truth and we area jazz much to ourselves as to our readers to get that right and anybody who could offer is going to produce a pro war screen at the end of it I think is gonna be a rather a dubious one what have you found what when you think back when your archivally trawling what's something that you can recall that was exciting to find oh well there are a lot little quite a few examples in that particular way I remember you know one of the best lessons I learned was in the archieve Nacional in Paris basically it was a tiny little report of the day astaire which was the French security police and this was about the Paris after liberation book about a German farmer's wife who was found having smuggled herself aboard one of the trains bringing the concentration camp prisoners back to Paris at the end of the war in the summer of 1945 and she had fallen in love with this French sergeant who'd been working on their farm well our husband was on the Russian front and he or she was found in Paris desperate to find him again and I mean that said so much about the way that the decisions of Stalin or Hitler had completely ripped away the traditional idea of the existence but I think the thing that one's looking for is not the big historical scoop for me is he is that detail the sort of human detail which brings the experience of warfare - life - because we're living now in them for a generation who brought brought up long after any form of military service or anything like that and this is why one needs to try to convey the reality through this sort of human detail and you're really always looking for greater granularity as you look at the past right it's just gold for absolutely authors isn't it but I've found I found whenever I thought I've had a scoop and for example on the Berlin book in fact it was passed to us by a friendly archivist in the Russian State Archives in GAF this document from the which was passed from barrier to Stalin and was not available to the public which was basically a barrier wanting to surround or being order by Stalin to surround the whole of Berlin with NKVD troops said just in case the Americans did still break through to Berlin said that they got all of the nuclear material as well as the scientists especially in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and anyway I got turbo excited about this but not when the book was published I forgot about I I thought didn't worry about scoops after that yeah yeah scoops are what we do it's hard to find a real scoop about something that happened 70 years ago so you've just finished a book on the Bulge I heard you publicly declare several years ago that the book that you had out at that time I think it was d-day was your last book on World War two well you one often has to rethink nor riseth so yes this is probably my second last on on world war ii so in looking at the Battle of the Bulge which characters emerge for you I mean what do you draw from it about both the German desperation at the time German tactics and operational art and on the American side the fundamental mistake was the Germans totally underestimated the rapidity of American reaction which was unbelievable when one thinks about it the Germans had assumed that Eisenhower would have to consult base with Washington and lund and have to discuss it with everybody and therefore that could not be a fast or rapid reaction they also underestimated I mean the fighting ability not obviously of all soldiers because many ran forage but a sufficient number of groups based in the 28th division and obviously all said 99th and further north by holding those shoulders and by slowing them up at the key spots and not just by storing butts and viet and and Vilks even and so forth and that had the critical effect of slowing them than they never therefore got the momentum going which they needed the ability of the despised calms it and generally all they despised I must say they did perform brilliantly in the vultureman the way that those drivers kept going and managed to double the number of troops I mean from 80,000 up to 190,000 or whatever for those who don't know General John CH Li Jesus Christ himself late chief Lotus Titian for the the US Army and widely despised but had his moments of effectiveness this being for me one of them thank you well the the frictions you talk about that beset the Germans virtually from the get-go virtually from the 16th of December was there ever a moment in your analysis of it when had they brushed those frictions aside that they could have had a much greater success than they ended up having I didn't think so partly for the question of weather and the terrain I mean the absolutely soggy ground meant that Panzers were bogged down too often the troops didn't get through I mean it all depended on getting that momentum and therefore creating such a state of collapse basically the American forces could not fight back but in fact they did fight back and that slowed it and from that point on it was a question of basically holding your nerve and bringing in the reinforcements and then eventually crushing it and fuel issues and all the rest besetting the Germans so Patton and 3rd army this is his moment of glory - how do you come down on that his his pivot to the to the left of a good portion of Third Army to ultimately really bastogne a celebrated moment in American military history how about from your perspective well no that was extremely impressive I'm in the irony the world was of course that Patton didn't want to hold Bastogne you know he felt that basically oh forget that he just they wanted a charge straight up basically up the borderline and cut off the whole thing from the base but again Patton was being wildly over-optimistic on that particular point to have attempted that against overwhelming forces which would not have worked and his actual advance from north from sort of our law and from the South's against the the southern flank of the German Seventh Army was not actually a very well handled even pattern in his own Diaries and letters acknowledges that he was pushing too hard and as a result actually losing time and and men and men so you mentioned the Eastern Front and nobody is better positioned than you to tie what was happening in the East to what was happening in the Ardennes in 44 or 45 I've just been reading a rereading Stalingrad fantastic book actually can you draw a line between Stalingrad and and the Soviets of of that era and Putin and the Russians today how does it how does it influence them 70 years later how does it play out well I think you're right in saying that he does influence them because I mean one's always going to get these from very misleading parallel historical parallels I mean I didn't if you remember there was quite a row in Britain and and Russia or whatever but when the Prince of Wales that made made remarks comparing Putin or comparing the events of the invasion of Ukraine and with not with 1938 and 39 and what one saw where that the word superficial parallels you know we saw the Sudetenland and 38 and the attempt of referenda or whatever it might be we also saw the way that Putin wanted to get back or desser and have a corridor I mean echoes of Danzig there is even an approach to the polls saying what about dividing up the Ukraine between us the pose knew straight away that this was this was just a typical Russian trap because the Russians would try to say this is what the polls suggested but those are all as I say misleading because let's face it you know Putin is not Hitler and certainly not even Stalin but there is one parallel I think and that's a psychological one between the mentalities of countries like Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union or Germany after Versailles who believe that they have been deeply wronged and then also become completely self-obsessed and self-centered in their attitude to their neighbors thinking that you know this is our right to exert control over neighboring countries and that I think is the worrying thing are there historic parallels or are there lessons to be learned for I mean if if David Cameron read you more closely or Max Hastings more closely or President Obama read American military historians in greater depth and I believe he's reading would they be better informed for dealing with not necessarily a Ukraine and Putin but with world events generally well I hope so because they should then stop making historical parallels themselves this may sound very hypocritical coming from me but I think one of the disasters is the way that the Second World War has become the defining reference point for every crisis and every conflict and media and politicians are both guilty of the way because they want to sound great but we know perfectly well warfare has changed fundamentally we saw in Iraq that you can have an overwhelming military victory but lose it virtually the next day yeah we're drawing parallels between Saddam Hussein and Hillary which exactly it's very popular well I know I mean we look at the way that for example time of Suez antony eden comparing nasa two hits yeah he's an all-purpose villain isn't it he's no purpose of that i know it's a little bit like the motive ridges the Godwin thing on the internet you know within three exchanges somebody's going to make a reference to that so in in researching the ardennes book where were you doing most of your work well huge amount at College Park Maryland and obviously Carlisle Pennsylvania certain amount obviously in Germany at Freiburg and the marvelous Sam long starts in the big detective a side character in Stuttgart which has all this huge collection of letters written by soldiers in Second World War which is all classified brilliantly classified by division Elora says I'm sure you've used it yourself but then the sort of you know some of the key stuff funny enough came in again the National Archives q London with all the WH to aerate their business which was the combined services detailed investigation Center W Turia's War Office it's the characterization at in the British National Archive and this is where they had all of these German Jews listening to the conversations of the German officers who'd been captured no and it's fantastic because here I mean from a researchers point of view it is absolute gold I mean these guys didn't know that they were being monitored and they were also using some stool pigeons huh who would go in what they do is they'd have an official interview interrogation would say some general and humid courts would refuse to say anything whatever it wasn't anybody can't come out stool pigeon would sort of say to him oh how did it go he said oh I didn't tell them about this that is the other and of course they had the whole lot on tape huh but you saw they're not just a question of the detail which is great in itself but also the language the mentality the mood the arrogance or in some cases also the guilt this is when they're being held in camps in Brittany any further ship to the US this is when they're being held in camps but some of them were also taped in US camps as well but this material was none of us knew about it this is what say in furious I didn't know about and I'm in fury I'm infuriated about it but it was a German historian sonken it--so who was doing some research on new boats in the Atlantic in the Battle of the Atlantic and when he was starting to do his sort of computer trawl and all the rest of it suddenly some of these things came up and he said what's this well William Spencer who's the one in charge of it and I went to ask him and I'm sort of how did we how did we miss this and he said well actually was announced at the time he said but obviously all you historians were asleep at them asleep at the wheel not for the last time not the last time I'm afraid anyway better late than never so we talked about how military history is in somewhat bad order in the Academy in the United States and in Britain and in Britain - where do you see it going I mean will will we run out of things to write about with world war ii or will people be writing about the Second World War five hundred years from now is is that one of those subjects I suppose Abraham Lincoln would be another one that just seems to be bottomless or we're bottoming out on World War two I didn't trade the wheel chokes I remember in 1995 when I was working in the archives in Moscow and I was incredibly lucky because in fact the military archives had just opened up at that particular stage but it was also the 50th anniversary at the end of the Second World War and I remember how all of the books on the subject published in Britain fail to sell a month or god you know is this it it's gone now or whatever but what we hadn't quite seen was the way that things were changing and I think that's in an interesting sort of subject in itself but at looking towards the future it's difficult to tell I think one of the reasons why it still holds the appeal that it does or the fascination is because moral choice is the sort of fundamental element in human drama and I didn't think any war had greater moral choice than the really the Second World War and in from the individual point of view as well as the political point of view and we are living in a post military environment and I think that people are fascinated by it since then warfare has changed it's becoming far more fragmented geographically and this is rather the fixation of history we tend to think of warfare in terms of the way to do always was in the past rather than the way that it's evolved not so looking back on the on the history works that you've written it's always difficult for an author to pick out favorite children but which ones hold up the best the one of course which made the whole difference to my life as well as everything else was the course Stalingrad partly because I was incredibly lucky in timing that the archives had just opened I mean the military archives that Podolsk there subsequently closed and subsequently closed you you hit the window just I was be incredibly lucky with the window the window there they closed him again basically in 2000 just after I'd finished the research on the bird in book some friends teased me saying that I was responsible for because the Russians were so angry about the Berlin book that they I thought I was responsible that's totally untrue books in fact they closed him in 2000 and the book didn't come out till 2002 they knew you were coming though well no I mean I do remember going back I mean when I first went there he we had to negotiate with the Ministry of Defence before we even allowed in and I remember the very first time having to go in there with Luba my wonderful Russian colleague and who was her doctor it was in plant biology which was absolutely perfect I didn't want to have a historian I wanted somebody who's very very intelligent we anyway we went into Minister of Defence and the the russian colonel who was in charge of it colonel romance jeff said we have a simple rule in our archives she said you tell us the subject we choose the files there was no point trying to sell the same line colonel that's not how it works in other archives or anything like that so I said well you know I'm trained want to write about Stalingrad and I said that in Freiburg in the German archives some of the most interesting documents in fact are those the reports written by doctors and by priests attached to German divisions was there at Tyler's roar of laughter from the Russian no priests in the Red Army and I said yes and I know no peace but perhaps the political officers the poly troops the commissar reports and that's actually where a real gold was so as you again look back on you're required when you receive a Lifetime Achievement Award to a wonder how much more life you've got and be to reflect on the achievements that have led to this if you had another ten years of writing life I think in decades you know ten years of writing life where you hope to be 10 years from now what would you have wanted to achieve every 10 no plan and then you then you can renew for another 100 you its 10-year enlistments it's starting to sound like the sort of British defense plan of preparing preparing for war 10 years ahead which they're doing in the 1930s I think that we'll see how sort of you know subjects come and go I really do think I've probably finished with the Second World War but I'll probably be proved humiliatingly wrong again but one looks back and thinks you know how incredibly lucky one was from the point of view of timing and you know looks forward thinking well lifetime achievement award maybe that should be a sort of more of a stick than a carrot to get one writing in the future I mean you know my dear father-in-law it was his father he's still publishing and writing at the age of 86 you know I feel that I think this it will be rather pathetic if one gave up prematurely congratulations again thanks so much for being with us again this is the right award to the right guy in the right here thank you very much indeed I'd like to thank Anthony beaver for joining me today to learn more about Anthony the award or the Pritzker military museum and library please visit Pritzker military dot org on behalf of the Pritzker military museum and library I'm Rick Atkinson thanks for watching this program was sponsored by Plante Moran and is a production of the Pritzker military museum and library

Channel: Pritzker Military Museum & Library

Views: 10,760

Rating: 4.7142859 out of 5

Keywords: Antony Beevor (Author), Rick Atkinson (Author), Soldier (Profession), pritzker military museum and library, pritzker, military, museum, library, chicago, Chicago Loop (Neighborhood), citizen soldier, History (TV Genre)

Id: 7_YBo25G-1Q

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 15 2015