World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises

my job is fairly simple this evening I introduced the moderator of this distinguished panel and then I get out of the way so I'll do that very quickly to save time many of you all know that mark Stoller is a distinguished historian you should also know that he is an avid baseball fan especially of his beloved New York Yankees applause boos whatever come on bring it on that's appropriate because tonight's lineup of speakers including Mark is the historians equivalent of the famed Yankees lineup of 1927 known as murderers row I'll leave it up to you all to decide which of the panelists most resembles Lou Gehrig Babe Ruth or Earle combs or any the other six on that lineup dr. Stoller received his BS from the City College of New York and his MA and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin he is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont where he talked for 37 years and received numerous teaching awards one of our nation's most distinguished and military history and military historians dr. Stoller is the author of many publications and books I'll just mention two allies and adversaries the Joint Chiefs of Staff the grand alliance and US strategy in World War two and his excellent biography of marshal soldier statesman of the American Century dr. Stoller currently serves as the editor of the papers of George Catlett Marshall and for the past two years has taught at Washington and Lee University in the spring he won't be doing that this year so he can take full enjoyment of the mud season in Vermont where he lives with his wife Diane please welcome dr. Stoller you lied Brian you said you're gonna keep it brief wit I will try to do better with the possible exception of the Civil War no event in our history is shrouded with more mythology and misconceptions than world war two and this afternoon we will explore some of those myths and misconceptions as well as some surprises with two highly distinguished historians from two different generations of World War two scholars and I make the third-generation I'm in the middle uh it the symmetry works out very very nicely here first professor Gerhard Weinberg the Kenan professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I referred to him by this title in a review of his work and I'll do it again he is the Dean of both modern German historians and World War two scholars there is no one who knows more about World War two than Gerhard Weinberg his knowledge is truly in cyclopædia his publications if I listed them all here there would be no time left for him to speak I mean I'll mention three works Hitler's foreign policy 1933 to 1939 the road to war visions of victory the hopes of eight World War two leaders and a world at arms a global history of World War two which many of us consider the best history of the entire war ever written he has twice won the American historical associations George Lewis beer prize and both the Samuel Eliot Morrison prize of the Society for military history and the Pritzker military library award for lifetime achievement in the field of military history he was also selected by the Society for military history and the Marshall foundation to deliver last year's George C Marshall lecture at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Boston he has chaired the German Studies Association the Army's historical Advisory Committee the historical advisory panel of the interagency group implementing the Nazi war crimes disclosure and Imperial Japanese records law the National World War two museums presidential Advisory Board I've had the privilege of serving under him on two of those boards fard my left professor William Hitchcock professor of history at the University of Virginia where he specializes in modern European history war and society and Cold War history he has previously taught at Yale Wellesley and temple he moved to UVA last year his numerous publications include France restored Cold War diplomacy and the quest of the leadership in Europe 1944 to 54 the struggle for Europe the turbulent history of a divided continent 1945 to the present and most recently the bitter road to freedom a new history of the liberation of Europe which won the American historical associations George Lewis beer prize and was a finalist for both the mark Linton Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in history presently he is writing a history of the Eisenhower years as as president now our format this afternoon is going to be for each panelist to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes and then we will open the floor to your questions and hopefully there'll be enough time and then we'll all be upstairs to answer further questions professor Weinberg first good afternoon can you hear me in the back we're holding a couple of seats here in the front for you in this talk I will engage a few myths concerning first concentrating first on - about the war in general then individual leaders and countries and finally a widely held mistaken view of World War 2 combat one myth about the war is that the victory of the Allies was due to their overwhelming superiority in human and material resources this you would have illicit laughter from those who fought at critical points in the conflict the victory of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain was not the product of vastly greater numbers those vastly greater numbers did not exist when the Red Army halted the German advance it did have greater numbers but these had been nullified by the prior decimation of its leaders by Stalin's purges contrary to German military memoirs Stalin did not control the weather it was invariably as cold and the snow as deep on the Russia as on the German side of the front I now turn to the Battle of Midway surely the g8 Japanese aircraft carriers were more numerous than the American three I shall return to the Japanese commander Yamamoto but even the four carriers he allotted to the critical engagement were more not less than that three American ones the issue of resources needs a careful look by the summer of 1942 the resources under axis control were not substantially inferior to those controlled by the Allies the Allies proved vastly superior in drawing on the resources at their disposal than their enemies who complicated utilization of the lands they had conquered by the systematic mistreatment of their populations a second myth is the separation of the war from the Holocaust Hitler did not plan war with France because the French would not let him visit Paris me and the Germans did not invade the Soviet Union because it would not allow a German cruise ship on the Caspian Sea there was purpose to the war Germany initiated that purpose was a demographic revolution on the globe of which killing all Jews was a central point Eren Rommel was first sent to North Africa to salvage Mussolini's hold on Libya but he was not sent into Egypt so that the pyramids could be dismantled and reacted yet well in he was to arrange the killing of all Jews in Egypt Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East with a murder commando at the at his headquarters Hitler did not trust the Italians who were to get the area to carry out this important mission since allied fighting and bombing killed more German soldiers and civilians out of a smaller population than Japan's I shall not engage the notion that this was a racial war in which presumably the Allies wanted to kill as many whites and as few Orientals as possible instead I now turn to leaders in the war Adolf Hitler comes first I've dealt in print with the myth that he was interested in an agreement with England there are more myths about Hitler's relations with his generals than about any other aspect of World War 2 there is time to engage only a few but many other products of fabrications in German military memoirs and the garbage German generals produced for the American army after the war a big problem mentioned by military memoirists was their inability to secure Hitler's permission for retreats they believed Ness Cerie there may have been instances of this but as a generalization it simply doesn't hold up a striking example in the fall of 1944 three German army groups were threatened with being cut off the Army Group in southwest France faced this threat from a meeting of Allied forces from Normandy with those that had landed on the French Mediterranean coast Hitler authorized the army groups withdrawal the Army Group in Southeast Europe was about to be cut off by the Red Army's meeting Tito's partisans Hitler authorized its withdrawal the army group at the northern end of the Eastern Front chased a Red Army thrust to the Baltic Sea cutting it off in western Latvia Hitler refused to authorize this army groups withdrawal in the same weeks he allowed the others to pull back why Hitler was responding to advice from Admiral Doenitz ahead of the German Navy who urged holding the southern shore of the Baltic so that Germany's new submarines and crews could train to turn the tide back in Germany's favor in the Battle of the Atlantic a second area in which Germany's generals asserted post-war claims to genius was their periodic insistence of pulling out of salience so that a shorter front would facilitate creating reserves to meet the Red Army's offensives or launch their own there is never any reference to the likelihood that pulling out of salience would produce a shorter red army front with analogous opportunities an example of this occurred in the preparation for the German 1943 summer offensive the generals persuaded Hitler to allow the abandonment of the demyansk and reserved salience this had two effects on the Red Army one strategic and one tactical the strategic effect was that there was now no expectation of a German offensive toward Moscow and hence no need to hold reserves before the capital the bikal effect was that the Red Army shortened its lines and gathered extra units were drive into the rear of the northern portion of Germany's 1943 offensive it might well failed anyway and I do not suggest that in all disputes Hitler was right in his journals wrong but rather that a reassessment of the myth of the latter's high competence is needed by their conduct of a war of extermination in the east they managed the extraordinary feat of converting Stalin from a bloody and hated dictator into the benign defender of his people according to the Germans own figures they supervised the killing or deaths from hunger and disease of an average of 10,000 prisoners of war per day seven days a week for the first seven months of the war in the east please note that this figure of over two million deaths does not include the more than a million Soviet civilians killed in the same month let's turn to Benito Mussolini his mouth was very much larger than his brain he preached endlessly about the benefits of war but failed to recognize Italy's limited capacity and the cost of aligning himself with Germany nevertheless there is too much denigration of Italy's forces during the conflict it was the Germans who insisted on substituting their enigma encoding machines that the British were reading for Italian soldiers that had not been broken the performance of the Italian Navy and army was not as poor as much of the subsequent writing suggests missing from most of the literature is the role of Italian army units on the Eastern Front and how their heavy casualties contributed to the evaporation of support for the fascist system in Italy we now turn to Winston Churchill from may 10th 1940 until July 19 45 he controlled the British war effort and he subsequently wrote a multi-volume memoir of the war in his account of the run-up to the war he did not mention that in the summer of 1938 while publicly chastising Neville Chamberlain for his policy toward Czechoslovakia he was privately telling the Prague government that if in office he would most likely follow the same policy the Battle of Britain was won by the fighters Chamberlain had insisted on having built perhaps that has some connection with this being the only important battle of the war after which the winning commander Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding was canned in his memoir history Churchill emphasized the point that became one of the major myths of the war he claimed to have opposed major concessions to the Soviet Union against the policy on this of President Roosevelt the myth deserves scrutiny two important issues on which the contemporary well-documented positions of the two different illustrates their contrasting views in the summer of 1940 the Soviet Union and next the three Baltic States while Churchill wanted to extend the jury recognition to this annexation Roosevelt opposed that move and by heavy pressure prevented the British from doing so in the summer of 1941 the issue arose in the negotiations for an alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union after Germany invaded the latter Churchill again wanted to concede the Soviet domain and Roosevelt again by massive pressure obliged London to abstain from Churchill's perspective this looked like an inexpensive way first to try to wean the Soviets away from their alignment with Germany and later to satisfy a new and highly a lie from Roosevelt's point of view the forced disappearance of independent countries was no more acceptable when carried out by the Soviets than by the Germans a second example involves the zones of occupation in Germany after that countries defeat afraid that Stalin might order the Red Army to stop at the June 1941 border and tell the Western powers that it was their turn to do the rest of the fighting Churchill had his government prepare a zonal division that placed Berlin deep inside the Soviet zone this would provide the Soviets with an incentive to continue to push forward with clues that this was not what the Americans wanted he had the British delegation present the line in the European Advisory Commission it was immediately accepted by the Soviets who may have thought this his only good idea Roosevelt wanted a division into zones that met in Berlin since the president was very concerned about access to the American zone of occupation one should not exclude the possibility that the president knew what he was about if one seeks an explanation of the policies of the two and Churchill's reversal of them in his memoir history one could should consider their consideration in 1943-44 and also Churchill's post-war career at the time Churchill was leading a country that had exhausted its human and financial resources was practically certain to be weaker in the future and hence might best make concessions early rather than be obliged to make greater ones from a weaker position later Roosevelt headed a country still mobilizing its resources and likely to become stronger and hence should postpone concessions and make them later from a stronger position he recognized the essential role of the Soviet Union in the war and like Churchill was equally worried that might be defeated or arrived at a compromise peace with Germany he worked hard to develop maintain decent relations with a difficult ally but there were limits to the concessions he would make unlike Roosevelt who died in April 1945 Churchill continued active in British politics after his electoral defeat in July 1945 in his memoirs he could refashion the past in accordance with what would have been his preference the insistence of this country on an invasion across the channel net meant that although the Soviets did most of the fighting the Western Allies gathered in the economically most advanced portions of the continent in any case Poland was going to be under German control of the Germans one or under Soviet control of the Allies one at the time of Yalta the red army controlled Poland and neither Churchill or Roosevelt could change that fact this was unfortunate for the poles but the blame must rest with neither of the Western leaders but with the refusal of the Germans to accept an independent Poland until after a Russian army came to Berlin for a second time it's now Stalin's turn since the evidence of his views of Czechoslovakia became apparent in part during the war one needs to go to a myth about his prior policy it is often argued that the Soviet Union should not have been excluded from the 1938 Munich settlement of the crisis over Czechoslovakia the myth is that the Soviet Union was interested in the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia and was prepared to fight a defendant how does this square with subsequent Soviet policy when Germany ended the country's independence in march 1939 and created the puppet state of Slovakia the Soviet Union was the only country outside the axis excuse me that extent it recognition to it and hence to the disappearance of Czechoslovakia went through the annexation of East of Poland the Soviet Union thank you when through the annexation of eastern Poland the Soviet Union attained a common border with what had been Czechoslovakia Stalin annexed the eastern part of that country a curious way of demonstrating interest in its territorial integrity we now turn to the war itself there is a belief that Stalin was extremely shrewd that might have been so in the internal situation where he wangled his way into power and had any conceivable opponents killed sent to the gulag or punished in the Foreign Affairs however he was as handicapped as Hitler by his belief in the nonsense he spouted because he seriously believed that Germany wanted colonies markets and investments from the Western powers it never occurred to him that Hitler's primary interest was in the seizure of land from the Soviet Union for agricultural settlement in spite of Roosevelt's advice Stalin opted for agreement with Germany in 1939 and helped that country drive the Allies off the continent in the north the west and the south he always blamed others rather than himself for thereafter faced in Germany alone on the continent in the East we now know that Soviet intelligence obtained a copy of the German basic order for the invasion of the Soviet Union shortly after it was distributed in December 1940 when the United States acquired a summary of this order and Roosevelt had it given to the Soviet ambassador in February 1941 Stalin did not see this as a confirmation instead as the late general Dmitri Varga gonna four showed me in 1991 he toss it into the wastebasket as a provocation when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 all intelligence available to Stalin pointed to the weight of the German thrust being on the central part of the front he insisted that the Red Army concentrate on the southern segment of the front with disastrous results in 1942 all evidence pointed to a German major offensive on the southern portion of the front so Stalin concentrated reserves on the central part again with predictable results he did slowly begin to trust his military advisors but the country paid heavily for Stalin's errors the cost of the war to the Soviet Union was enormous but a substantial portion was due to a leader who would not believe what his intelligence services and his allies told him who had earlier decimated the country's officer corps and who had insisted during major segments of the fighting on seriously erroneous strategic priorities it's now Roosevelt's turn I've already dealt with one of the myths about the president there's time for a few more the extensive literature about Roosevelt's policy toward the war in 1940-41 mostly ignores the long available evidence on the basis of decrypted access messages Declassified in the mid-1970s the german historian jehovah in 1984 published an analysis showing how intelligence on u-boat dispositions was utilized to divert individual ships and convoys far from seeking incidents the United States was trying to avert them Roosevelt used the few that occurred to awaken the American people to the dangers ahead but it would have been possible to utilize the information to ensure an incident every few days there was also the discovery of tapes of the president's confidential conversations when a recording machine was accidentally not turned off this text published in 1982 similarly shows the president's interest in keeping the country out of formal participation in the war as for the Pacific Theater there is equally solid evidence precedents like all others are limited to 24 hours then why did FDR devote an enormous amount of time to negotiations with the Japanese and direct personal conversations and in discussions with Secretary of State Cordell Hull when the latter was to meet Japanese diplomats is it not likely that he hoped to stall off Japan until its leaders could see that Germany might well lose not win the war had they waited another two weeks they might have recognized in the German defeats on the eastern front and the British offensive in North Africa signs that a German victory was by no means certain Hitler had the opposite concern he pushed the German army forward before Moscow in December 1941 in part precisely because he feared that Japan might not go to war but settle with the Americans the issue of the embargo on oil sales to Japan also deserves another look when the Japanese occupied northern French Indochina in September 1940 one might see this as cutting a supply route to nationalize China and thus connected with the war with China but the occupation of southern French Indochina in July 1941 pointed away from that war and toward war with the United States Britain and the Netherlands unlike Stalin who provided the Germans with oil until minutes before they invaded the country Roosevelt did not think it was wise to provide Japan with oil to stockpile for war with the United States in the final stage of the negotiations the suggestion was made that if the Japanese would evacuate southern Indochina the United States would sell them all the oil they wanted the Japanese diplomats in Washington were instructed not to discuss this idea for Tokyo war with the United States Britain and the Netherlands was preferable at that time when originally encouraged by the Germans to seize British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia in 1940 and 41 he had replied that they would do this in 1946 after the Americans had left their bases in the Philippines it was on the basis of Germany's promise to join them in war with the United States that the Japanese had decided not to wait but to strike in 1941 instead a final myth about Roosevelt concerns his in Churchill's approval of the plan of secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to transform Germany into a country like Holland and Denmark with a high standard of living but no heavy industry as Churchill put it quote fat but impotent myth makers have refrained from looking at the original document published decades ago it's four pages of map illustrate the obvious if such a change were to be made Germany would need the bulk of its eastern agricultural land one could not take it away push the Germans there into the remainder and expect the country to survive without vast export industries the project was abandoned because of Stalin's insistence on the Orang ISIL on the proposal Roosevelt Churchill preferred was too soft not too hard on the Germans two myths about President Truman relate to his wartime roller the emphasis on his unprepared 'no stu assume the presidency is generally exaggerated he had not only served in the American army in France in World War one but had maintained an interest in military affairs in subsequent years he had to be briefed on many matters on succeeding to the presidency including the details on the atomic bomb and Soviet espionage on its development but he was not an ignoramus like his predecessor he developed the close working relationship with army chief of staff George C Marshall unlike the civilian side of the government where Truman made substantial changes relatively early kept the military leaders Roosevelt had appointed the other myth is the controversy over the anticipated American casualties in the two planned invasions of the home islands of Japan of which Truman authorized the first in the June 1945 invariably the likely casualties of the Chinese Russians British and others are omitted from this discussion similarly the planned Japanese killing of all the prisoners of war they held is ignored perhaps into this discussion one should enter the anticipated casualties on the Japanese side about which there was no controversy the Japanese anticipated that there would be 20 million Japanese casualties a figure Tokyo deemed acceptable until the second atomic bomb suggested to some that the Americans could drop an indefinite number and hence not have to invade at all now that the focus is on Japan maybe the time to touch on Japanese war aims these are often described as limited to resource rich parts of Southeast Asia the Japanese certainly wanted them but the inclusion of India Alaska Australia and Cuba to mention only a few hardly points to a modest program of annexations a Japanese leader who has received much favorable attention is Admiral Yamamoto first there is his insistence on the Pearl Harbor attack as a substitute for the prior naval plans a project accepted in mid-october 41 because of his threat to resign as commander of the combined fleet leaving aside that an attack on the Americans in peacetime was practically guaranteed to destroy the Japanese concept of conquering lots and then making a settlement in which they could keep much of their gains there were two practical defects the Yamamoto's plan both predictable and irremediable first in the gyre as the Japanese knew the places where American warships were anchored were quite shallow for this reason special torpedoes that ran rather shallow had to be utilized in practice this meant the chips torpedoed at their moorings would sink into the mud they could not be sunk we know that the Arizona exploded but the other battleship settled on to the harbor floor from there all except the Oklahoma were raised repaired and returned to action a second equally predictable result of the rape was the survival of most crew members of the ships attacked this is not to ignore the heavy loss of life on the Arizona and casualties from other ships but attacking warships at anchor in Port on a Sunday guarantees that many crew members will be on shore leave and most onboard will survive the rapid revival and effective fighting of the American Navy was due in part to the train crew members of the warships who survived we will never know if the original Japanese Navy's hopes for an engagement in the Pacific would have worked out as planned I have considerable doubt but nothing could have been worse for Japan than Yamamoto scheme that raises the question why was he so insistent on the project with defects that were so readily foreseeable there is an intriguing aspect of the last paper exercise of the plan that he conducted in September 1941 in that exercise it was determined that among the ship's son would be the aircraft carriers including the Yorktown not a single officer in the room had the moral courage to say but your excellency how can we sink the Yorktown in Pearl Harbor knowing that it is in the Atlantic none of these officers had the backbone to challenge a commander whose mind was so firmly made up that none they are prise it open with a touch of reality in this extraordinary rigidity of Yama motors we may also see one of the roots of his preference for complicated battle plan a tendency passed on to his successors as mentioned earlier of the eight carriers at his disposal he allocated for to the central portion of the Midway operation with two sent off to support the lining on the ally oceans and two held back with the main battle fleet these four survived the battle but whatever what would have happened if at the critical point the Americans had faced not four but eight carriers and if the Japanese had liked the Americans made fast repairs on the carrier damage in the Coral Sea battle and had made it nine against three something should be said about the Chinese war effort under John Kasich well there is no doubt about the corruption and other internal problems of his regime the time they have come for another look at a leader who held much of his country together against a better trained and better armed foe for many years the insistence of the Japanese on fighting the Chinese all those years and in the most horrendous way they could think of paved the way for the triumph of Mao few would suggest that the people of China are better off as a result a final myth in need of review concerns the way the toofus are fought on the field of battle most think of world war ii as fought by men women and machines that is wrong the United States utilized the variety of animals from dogs in the Pacific to mills in Europe with the British adding elephants in Burma the Japanese and Italian armies utilized horse transport extensively the German army was heavily dependent on horses employing over three million now here was another source of friction between Hitler and his generals where he was closer to the reality in the winter bringing out fodder for the horses is difficult at the time when I cannot graze through deep snow since then pulling equipment over poor snowed in roads is especially difficult double harnessing was frequently resorted to when a force advances equipment left behind can be retrieved by leading the horses back but when a force from preached whatever is not pulled back first is likely to be lost the practical assistant is certain losses of valuable equipment in winter was not fully understood by commanders most of whom had fought on the Western Front of World War one with its relatively short distances it was their dependence on horses that fed the confidence of many German generals that they could crush any Allied landing in the West they correctly estimated that because of the weather in the channel a landing would occur in the summer there would then be much grass for their horses to graze on but the Allies could not train their tanks and trucks to heat grass the dependence of the Western Allies on motorized equipment would provide an advantage for the German army with its horses it never occurred to any of on the German side that this was known to the Allies who had decided on Pluto the pipeline under the ocean to pump fuel under the channel the rapid pursuit across France by the Allies in August September 1944 was eventually slowed because of fuel problems but by then it was too late to throw the Allies across into the channel the Red Army was also heavily dependent on horses the American provision of tens of thousands of trucks greatly assisted the Soviets nevertheless German civilians in Berlin in April 1945 noted that the Red Army brought into the city great numbers of horses and substantial numbers of camels neither of the huge armies fighting on the main front of World War two could have operated without the horses that have largely disappeared from popular memory in this country many myths have influenced the perceptions of the greatest war of which we know a talk and an institution named for one of the most carefully objective military leaders of the conflict may be a good occasion to subject a few of these to the cold look that he tended to accord dubious proposals thank you good evening I'm enormous ly flattered and an honor to be invited to speak tonight to this to this group and to be on this panel with two people who are truly rockstars of world war ii history they are there there are stars in the firmament and I'm humbled to be on a panel with both of them my own comments today are drawn from my recent book the bitter road to freedom which treats just the final year of World War two in Europe now writing a book on a topic that is as well known and well studied as the liberation of Europe presents some challenges there are so many fine books that have been written on the topic what possibly could one say that hasn't already been said surely we've we've studied every aspect of the liberation of Europe particularly in the Western theatre but the miraculous thing about history is that there are always new discoveries to be made if only we have two things first when addressing a familiar topic we need fresh and interesting new questions and second we need new sources of evidence new questions and new evidence always lead to new discoveries and to surprises the new question that I posed in my book and to which I felt I didn't have an adequate answer was this what was the experience of liberation in Europe like for those who experienced it for those who went through it for those Europeans who lived through it now in posing the question this way I was admitting that we do know a great deal about the American combat experience in 1944 to 1945 in Western Europe we know a great deal about what the young American soldiers endured on the beaches of Normandy and in the wintery hills of the RDM we know a good deal about the liberators but we haven't often turned our focus to look at the ordinary people who were liberated what did they go through in 1944 to 1945 this was my new question so I needed some new evidence I could not simply turn to US sources because they wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know I had to go to Europe and to work in archives there especially in collections that would get me as close to the ground level view as possible fortunately there are many such collections too often overlooked by American scholars of course there's the wonderful Imperial War Museum in London which I'm sure many of you have been to and they have a wonderful collection of first-hand accounts diaries letters and personal documents that are absolutely astounding unpublished and irreplaceable but there are many more local archives in pretty much every town and department in Normandy maintain their own records local police records local accounts of what happened in that period 1944 to 1945 in Belgium is a wonderful Center on world war ii studies that i worked on for a number of a number of weeks and the curator said they hadn't had an american scholar there in ten years the Dutch have maintained enormous World War two records and Italy as well and of course the materials gathered by the United States during the occupation of Germany after the war provide us with a great deal of material and not least the US strategic bombing survey which is very useful has very useful interviews of people who experienced the American bombing and the British bombing of western Germany so based on these materials I tried to paint a portrait of a continent in turmoil passing from the tyranny of Nazism to the post-war period and my attention again was drawn to ordinary people and their lives because I felt that's what we failed to integrate into our telling of the liberation story so let me share with you to focus on our theme tonight three surprises things that I felt were new surprising to me though I have to say I don't think there's anything that gerhard von Berg it will surprise him so if he's a kike he's given a pass yeah it's a it's just not fair well the first surprise we normally assume that the liberation of Europe served to bring the liberators and the liberated together in a warm embrace of common purpose and gratitude what I found is that the astonishing violence of the war of liberation drove anglo-american liberators and continental civilians apart as I was reading through the letters and the diaries of British soldiers particularly the appear of War Museum these men who fought in Normandy in the summer of 1944 from d-day on June 6 right on to the end of the Normandy campaign in late August I kept coming across this common pattern repeatedly many soldiers wrote that rather than being welcomed as heroes they were actually received quite coldly by the French people the reception wasn't hostile but it was distant and reserved one British soldier wrote if we'd expected a welcome we certainly fail to find it the French people they encountered in Normandy will quote sullen and silent it was rather a shock wrote corporal LFT Roker the Highland Light Infantry to find that we were not welcomed to spec ecstatically as liberators by the local people as we were told we would be they saw us as bringers of destruction and pain now at first this didn't seem right to me it was but it was the kind of observation I found in many Diaries and memoirs of the soldiers this cool distant reserve on a part of the French at least in Normandy what explains this restrained welcome to the liberators well if you look into the records of the local communities in Normandy and their experiences during the summer of 1944 of course the answer is not difficult to find for many months before the d-day landings the coastline of Normandy had been pounded day and night by Allied air bombardment on the night of June 5 just before d-day the biggest air bombardment of the entire war up to that point was unleashed on German coastal defences in Normandy alas not only Germans were hit we now know that 3,000 French people died during the 24 hours following d-day under these massive bombings that incidentally is about the same number roughly of Allied servicemen who were killed on d-day so there is a rough equivalence between those French civilians killed and anglo-american liberators killed in that same 24-hour period we rarely put these two facts together at the picture only got worse during the campaign in the summer of 1944 in Normandy almost 20,000 French civilians died in the crossfire mostly as a result of Allied air assaults on the towns and cities which the Germans were defending and that too amounts to roughly the same number of US soldiers that died in the Normandy campaign around calm which the British failed to take on d-day the battle raged for two months calm was a city a home to 60,000 people it had three gothic churches two large hospitals in a great University all of this was obliterated during two months of savage fighting most of the city residents fled the town and 15,000 of them huddled in makeshift shelters in caves at the stone quarries a few miles south of town living in filth and squalor for two months some were not so lucky two thousand people were killed in kann during its liberation as a direct result of Allied bombing bombing which the Allied records show did little to damage the German defensive positions all of this damage necessarily had a negative influence on the reception of the liberators in late July when the British finally pushed into the destroyed city of Cong a Benedictine nun recorded in her diary the diaries kept in the local archives and in Calvados that the soldiers quote have been received in calm without great enthusiasm the residents have been too shaken by the memory of days of agony and mourning which we have experienced by all the civilian dead by all the grief there was not on this day the joy that we might have had if the friends and she put that word in quotation marks in her own diary had saved the women the children the old people there's been too much suffering the situation doesn't improve much if we if we were reversed the perspective and asked what did liberating soldiers think of these besieged and warn people these French people of Normandy what did they see when they looked at them as it happens they didn't think very much of them these civilians had been living in basements bombed out buildings and rude shelters and the caves outside of car they had no water no sanitation no clothing they were filthy and in rags they were hungry scared and destitute and to the liberators these bedraggled Normans seemed other world weird even in human in the eyes of the liberators if they'd hoped for champagne and partying they would have to wait Normandy one soldier wrote stank of dead men and cattle well in a place so violently disordered by war a place so lacking in civilized shape it seemed perfectly normal for Allied soldiers to take possession of property livestock clothing boots any other objects that caught their fancy especially Calvados brandy one woman in Columbia nearby town watched powerless as a unit of Canadians systematically looted her home breaking open locked cupboards and trunks even fighting over who got what hens rabbits chickens they were all snatched up destined for the evening campfires of the soldiers who quite literally took possession of the land they fought to liberate even once the Allies got into Belgium where they set up shop on the doorstep of Germany in the winter in spring of 1944 245 they were not always welcome there was a huge outpouring of celebration in Brussels in September 1944 but within a few short weeks the reality of being liberated and then occupied by an army of almost two million armed tired hungry homesick and anxious teenagers set in on the Belgians my son just turned 15 and I can only imagine according to the Belgian police records not a single day went by without Allied soldiers getting into brawls and bars accosting ladies on the streets breaking shopfront windows and raucously demanding booze and generally making a disturbance of themselves and yes soldiers sought out liaisons with ladies of the night on a regular basis with predictable consequences by June of 1945 about 15 percent of all US soldiers in Europe half a million men had venereal disease the consequences of being liberated were lethal in eastern Belgium when the Battle of the Bulge broke out in December 1944 perhaps 3,000 Belgians were killed in the crossfire and the prolonged US occupation in eastern Belgium as the Allies prepared to knife eastward into Germany stirred up a lot of resentment and anger according to one Police Commissioner the phrase most often heard among Belgians by September 1945 was simply Oh Lord deliver us from our liberators so we can't assume that the war brought Europeans and Americans closer together in a common embrace in many ways in the early stages of the liberation in endzones that saw a lot of combat it drove them apart that leads me to my second surprising discovery which is this the American GIs liked the German people their enemy more than any other group of Europeans that they encountered on the continent now this really surprised me because I knew then preparation for the occupation of Germany at the end of the war the American government and Army had settled on a harsh policy toward German people the US and British military both gave very strict orders to their own liberating soldiers that Germans were off-limits there could be no fraternizing no handshaking no speaking to German civilians no removing of hats as a courtesy in public only direct orders delivered in an imperious tone the policy was meant to drive home the the fact in the mind of the victor powers that Germans were a defeated people a guilty people and international outcasts there's some wonderful radio spots at the US Armed Forces Radio developed to bring - to broadcast this policy home to the to bring it home to the soldiers to repeat over and over don't talk to the Germans don't be nice don't fraternize a couple of these sort these spots I've countered in the archives soldiers wise don't fraternize that was the tagline so don't talk to the Germans but the announcements are amazing that Frau going to market may look harmless enough this is one radio spot the odds are she walks in a dead woman's shoes sent from the furnaces of my tunic don't forget that in a hurry steer clear and don't fraternize it laid it on pretty thick well this reserve this official policy of reserve at the grassroots level melted away almost overnight within days of their arrival in Germany US soldiers were chatting with Germans bartering with them sometimes drinking and dancing with them and also helping them to rebuild their homes start water supplies again clear roads procure foodstuffs and supplies what explains this Swift turn around in us-german relations at the grassroots level I suggest two factors first American soldiers encountered such scenes of physical destruction and devastation Western Germany that they concluded different from official policy that the Germans had suffered enough for their sins Allied bombers dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany and destroyed 3 and a half 3 3.5 million homes and dwellings and killed at least half a million people and perhaps more Allied bombing of Germany wounded an additional 800,000 people and left seven and a half million homeless Time magazine reporter Sydney Olson writing from the city of Cologne described this scene a mud-stained veteran stared with dazed eyes at the desolation about him murmuring over and over ain't it awful ain't it awful to the men who arrived on German soil in the last few months of the war and who then occupied the country in 1945 the bombing had served as a kind of evening out of the scoresheet it seemed that no harsh occupation was required to bring home the lessons of the war to the German people the Bombers had done that the problem was that sympathy opened the way to forgiveness and it was not long before Americans were looking the other way and generally helping the Germans sweep under the rug much of what had transpired inside Germany during the war but there's a second reason that explains the rapid thaw between American GIS and the German people in summer of 1945 put simply US soldiers liked the Germans especially female Germans and the feeling was mutual a Stars and Stripes reporter saw American soldiers near Aachen help German housewives with their chores play with their children and quote through other acts of friendship make living more tolerable through the creation of a friendly atmosphere and the eyes of the GI the Germans fared well when compared to the French said one trooper these people are cleaner on a damn sight friendlier than the frogs there are kind of people naturally it wasn't just elderly German housewives that the G I wanted to meet a report from the psychological warfare division put the issue bluntly quote - a man bored and fed up with the company of other men almost anything in skirts is a stimulant and a relief and German women were undeniably attractive in a wholesome physical sexy way this is the official report speaking they were what the boys called ez GI and Fraulein were magnet and Steel unquote American troops found German women willing to spend time in the company of GIS in exchange for the luxuries that every GI carried in his rucksack tinned food cigarettes chocolates soap pens paper and alcohol it was a match made in heaven and from this grassroots friendship developed a much larger reconciliation of nations a warm story perhaps but not at all what was intended and this kind of rapid reconciliation made it much that much more difficult once the war was over to hold the German people accountable for their wartime actions these were the same Germans after all who had welcomed Hitler cheered his triumphal marches given him agile ation as his armies crashed into Poland Russia and France much of this was rapidly forgotten by soldiers and civilians who both shared a common aim of suppressing the recent past I'll close by drawing your attention to a third surprise the book offers and it's perhaps the most surprising and incomprehensible one of all it is of course commonplace to depict the liberation of Europe is bringing out bringing about however belatedly the rescue of surviving European Jews from further torment and destruction at the hands of the Third Reich yet it's not widely known that the liberation of Europe did not deliver freedom to the surviving Jews of Europe it mid 1945 Jews were released from one kind of torment but they were not yet able to find security and freedom the reason for this is that liberated Jews from Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union had nowhere to return to they refused to return to their homeland for their families in many cases their homes synagogues and towns had been eradicated during the war and the Communists controlled regime and for example in post-war Poland offered them little encouragement to come home many Jews hoped that with the war over they could emigrate either to the United States or more likely to British control Palestine to join the fledgling Jewish settlement there and begin a new life but the American government refused to accept any large influx of Jewish survivors into the United States and the British government closed off the hope of immigration to Palestine so the Jews who had survived Hitler now faced a new obstacle to freedom US and British official policy so with an uncertain and gloomy future Jewish survivors freed from death camps simply settle down in Germany itself and waited at first fifty thousand then a hundred thousand and then as many as two hundred and fifty thousand European Jews came into occupied Germany in 1945 and 1946 and sought out the temporary protection of the Allied occupying armies with the support of the American and British armies Jews built refugee camps or converted camps once used by the Germans to house prisoners and they waited it is hard to believe but in the months and years after May 1945 thousands of Jews continued to live in camps in the heart of the country that had caused them such torment without any idea of what the future held for them to be sure this is also a story of resilience and courage inside these Jewish encampments thousands of Jews managed to create a kind of life there were yudish newspapers like the longs burger loggers item and schools libraries workshops and musical concerts there was a sense of political activity two elections were held politics were debated in October 1945 David ben-gurion toured these camps he declared his intention to win the release of these refugees and get them into Palestine and yet until 1948 most of them remained in this strange semi captivity in the heart of occupied Germany so let me repeat hundreds of thousands Jewish survivors of the Holocaust came to live in temporary camps and shelters inside u.s. occupied Germany after the war and they stayed there for as long as four years after the war liberated but not free that is the way they describe their own predicament look carefully at popular treatments of the end of World War two and I think you'll find that this sad chapter is missing so in conclusion let me just say that World War two is full of surprises if you ask new questions and look for new evidence but be careful because sometimes the surprises that you find make for uncomfortable reading thank you very much thank you very much both of you um Joanne asked me to do a maximum five minutes of my own list of myths so I will simply throw them out as bullet points uh just to add to the pot here and then throw it open to questions these will focus mostly on this country okay guess what we didn't win the war alone US Armed Forces 15 million in uniform that constituted only 25% of the total allied military forces against the Axis powers but we did provide about two-thirds of the war material to the Allied cause to the grand alliance was not a failure because it broke down after victory and because the Cold War followed most military alliances break down once the war ends this 1-ranked is one of the most successful in military history it achieved total victory the great failure was the axis Alliance which stands as a case study in how not to conduct coalition warfare third great Gerhart alluded to the fact Roosevelt was not politically naive I'll give it a point he nut did not give away anything to Stalin at the Alta conference that is one of the greatest of all the World War two myths and if you believe Roosevelt practiced appeasement there so did Churchill and so did Stalin beyond that appeasement guess what it's not a dirty word it's one of the oldest principles in diplomacy and human behavior ask yourself when was the last time you appeased a friend or a member of your family or they appeased you the problem is that was its misapplication in the 1930s to a man who could not be appeased and ironically as Garrett pointed out in a wonderful article 25 years ago Munich was neither a total disaster for the West nor a total victory for Adolf Hitler given what he wanted ironically the only one to emerge from Munich unhappy was Adolf Hitler I'd also throw in the United States was not isolationist there is a difference between isolationism and unilateralism nor was it totally military unprepared before Pearl Harbor it was more prepared in December 1941 than before any previous war it had fought and finally uh the idea that Roosevelt set up the fleet at Pearl Harbor the conspiracy theory that will not die every generation somebody else brings it up does not have a leg to stand on I'll leave it at that throw it open to questions yes tom considering the building and museum we are in are there myths misconceptions and surprises not George Marshall question is given the building we're in are there myths misconceptions and surprises about George Marshall that we should know since the sixth and seventh volumes have not gone to press yet I can't say anything really would either of you care - he did at least in my opinion violate his own views once he allowed the effort to retake the islands in the Aleutians to go forward when that was completely unnecessary the heavy casualties the American seventh division suffered on a tube were really totally unnecessary it seems to me there was no way that the Japanese could go anywhere from there by that time our submarines were getting torpedoes that work and therefore would have sunk any supply ships and this would have been one place well Marshall could have applied the wording from the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta The Mikado you know whether Mikado comes on and he sings my purpose all sublime I will achieve in time to make the punishment fit the crime the punishment fit the crime it has always seemed to me that the proper punishment for the Japanese who landed on Attu and Kiska would have been to lead them there they could then eat boiled lava for breakfast fried lava for life and sauteed lava for dinner the fact that it took until early the following year 44 for the seventh division to be put back together again if you will for the next operation where they were in quadrant Lane how and why Marshall went along with this scheme is if not it's not a myth it's just simply always been a puzzle hmm I would throw in a controversial one I think in retrospect it was a big mistake for Marshall to have rescued Douglas MacArthur politically by recommending that he received the Congressional Medal of Honor given the problems that were faced later now that is using historical hindsight and I can defend what was done on the basis of what was going on at that moment but in effect you set up a tragedy later later on that's a bit unfair I know yes sir December 8 41 the United States and Claire's war on the Japanese Empire four days later Hitler Paris Germany declared war the United States if he hadn't done what is your all's assessment the United States question is if Hitler had not declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor how long would it have taken for the United States to make war on Nazi Germany is that correct throw that the real issue I'm afraid sure is exactly the other way around the Japanese would not have attacked us unless they were absolutely certain that the Germans were in it with them they were planning as I mentioned in my talk to wait till 1946 to strike south and the answer why 1946 of all years was that under the tidings McDuffie law back from the 1930s we were going to give the Philippines their independence in 44 and give up our bases there in 46 and the Japanese were afraid to move south with the Americans on their flank and when they told the Germans this the Germans said well for goodness sakes we better go now and if you go we're in it with you and since the Germans had not developed in Hitler's years a great reputation for sticking to their commitments you will understand why a few days before attacking Pearl Harbor the Japanese asked Berlin and Rome are you still in this with us and they said absolutely and what is very interesting is the following the German Navy had been calling for war with the United States since October 39 and Hitler had held them back because Germany had not been able to build the Bluewater Navy to fight the United States that they've been working on since 1937 nor did they have an ally who had the Navy the moment Hitler in his East Prussian headquarters heard about Pearl Harbor he immediately told the German Navy to start war on the United States and eight other countries in the Western Hemisphere the idea of waiting to go to war with the United States for one or two or perish forbid three days was just too awful for him to contemplate there was in other words if the Japanese had not been certain that the Germans were coming in with them they would never have attacked the United States in the first place so one has to reverse the situation there was no particular reason for the United States to go to war with Germany just because I don't know German is such a difficult language for some students there is I would suggest one very interesting insight that is the opposite of what I said about Hitler not wanting to wait three days it is generally forgotten in this country that in December 41 not only Germany Italy and Japan declared war on the United States but Romania Hungary and Bulgaria declared war on the United States and Roosevelt knowing that the Germans and Italians had submarines in the Atlantic that would so there was going to be fighting right away couldn't quite figure out number one how the Hungarians Bulgarians and Romanians were going to fight us and why and that possibly those people could live without a war with the United States and in a met in a step that I cannot find any parallel for in history he instructed the State Department to try to get those three countries to withdraw their declarations of war and since everybody had diplomats in Turkey that is in Ankara which was still there neutral you see what I mean he tried four had the State Department try for months to get these countries to withdraw their declarations of war and Harty the region of Hungary and marshal Antonescu of Romania and King Boris of Bulgaria all felt the air countries could not live without having all over the United States and in June of 42 I think it's very interesting six months later Roosevelt gave up incentive message to the Congress these people absolutely insist they have to have war with us so since we're not going to surrender our independence to them I guess we have to accommodate them and the Congress proceeded then to declare war on these countries I mention this because I think it's an interesting contrast with the man who couldn't wait three days to go to war I think that there's no eagerness on one side and a great deal of eagerness on the other um American historians disagree wildly as the question is always asked at what point in 1941 did Roosevelt think war with Germany was inevitable and some of us say not until December 11th 1941 what Roosevelt was set upon was making sure that Britain survived that the Soviet Union survived and that Nazi Germany would eventually be beaten but that does not mean that he was ready to enter the war in fact he was very upset about the army victory program in September of 1941 to build an army of over 200 divisions the Navy yes the Air Force yes but the army no he once quipped that American Mother's don't want their sons to be soldiers though they don't seem to mind them being sailors yes sir based on what you just said and answer this thing but Roosevelt have thought that the war could have been brought to a conclusion without our fighting German before December they didn't want to get into a war with Germany did he think we could avoid it our question is that Roosevelt think we could avoid war with Germany forever and that Germany could be beaten by the other countries that the United States was aiding that's you mark that's me Roosevelt like to fly by the seat of his pants his answer would be let's wait and see uh he is not someone who likes long-term planning which drove Marshall and the other Chiefs of Staff crazy he doesn't want to have look let's just wait and see what develops is the way I would read it oh well I think when I still go back here in the summer of 1940 Marshall and the other Chiefs were convinced Britain would go under Roosevelt was not convinced in this he thought that aid to Britain would be useful and his judgment turned out to be correct the next year and 41 again his military advisors including Marshall were pretty sure that the Soviet Union would be crushed by the Germans Roosevelt had doubts on that score and therefore started aiding the Soviets so in these areas he came to trust his own judgment because twice in a row it turned out that he was right yeah and his advisor is who who then did what they were told don't get me wrong they when he said what to do they did it but their advice had been based on erroneous assessments and his assessment had been correct so that by the winter of 41 42 there were signs that the Russians and the Brits between them maybe could beat Germany and if Japan had not then taken the plunge this is entirely possible we tend to forget in the arguments on which mark Stoller has written a very good book the politics of the section on the other side of this why's the Russians waited to open a second front in the Pacific until three months after the war in Europe was over huh they were the only one of the major powers of the World War two who could fight on only one front that fighting was most of the fighting of the whole war to be sure but there were real signs and one of the reasons as I mentioned Hitler was so terrified in the winter of 41 and kept pushing the German army to go for Moscow go go even though it was terribly difficult because he was afraid that the Americans and Japanese would come to an agreement and since he was going to go on a war with the United States anyway why having an ally with a big Navy from his point of view was very important because from the German perspective whether an American warship the sunk in the Pacific or the Atlantic that make any difference once it's at the bottom of the ocean what has - we tend to forget that other leaders make decisions not on the basis of what we think or we think we know but on the basis of what they think and what they think they know and if Roosevelt had been able to keep the Japanese yacking for another two weeks as he managed to keep them yakking for about nine months they would probably have seen in this German defeat before Moscow that maybe maybe they're not going to win as we have up to now felt so sure they would yes sir could I ask the question about the morgenthau plan' which has been described as overly generous to Germany is it not true that many economists protested in autumn 1944 that any plan for the compulsory deep industrialization of Germany would strike fatal blow to the entire European economy is not true that Churchill called the morgenthau plan' and irritation had written to shackle itself to a corpse there's a little surprised at the description of the morning okay let me read just just the state the question isn't it true that many economists opposed the morgenthau plan' the Churchill opposed the morgenthau plan' that a lot of that's that's basically it economists had different views on this that as economists tend to do about everything Churchill was in favor of it the critical point here was an effort to prevent what everybody at the time was terrified of we forget this today 20 years after the Germany's World War 1 defeat they were running around the globe again and everybody was terrified that in another 20 years those folks would be at our throats again now you and I know that between them the Red Army and the strategic bombing offensive taught the Germans that if you don't want your house to burn don't set the world on fire and they have learned that lesson but during World War 2 we tend to forget how concerned people in all countries the main reason that Stalin agreed to a United Nations Organization interestingly enough after the Soviets had been thrown out of the League of Nations was because he saw it as a prospective barrier against a new German effort at a third world war under those circumstances the notion that having Germany as I said and as it was said at the time rather like Denmark and Holland high standard of living but no heavy industry look quite attractive and certainly looked very attractive to Winston Churchill oh but that would mean that Germany had to keep the agricultural surplus lands that it had and it was Stalin not at that point really that friendly to the Germans who torpedoed the possibility by insisting that the eastern part of Germany be taken away and turned over to Poland and a piece of it the Soviet Union and all the people in it shoved out into the rest of Germany I have sometimes wondered whether the additional five six million people who lost their homes because the morgenthau plan' was eventually scuttled are really quite that happy about having that dropped as I said that whether it was right or wrong the reason it was drop was that it was too soft on the Germans not too hard on them okay that's a wonderfully provocative and in my view I don't want to use unpersuasive but I think I think controversial provocative statement that the morgenthau plan' was too soft the morgenthau plan' was part of it we might say a 30 year debate over what to do with with German the German economy and it had been going on since 1918 so to say that the economists had disagreed about the morgenthau plan' well of course they'd been talking about this in 1918 when Keynes wrote the economic consequences of the peace and his argument tried to counter the French view that you could essentially contain Germany by by weakening its economy was that this was a recipe for disaster for all of Europe and that and that Germany was the engine of economic prosperity and there was no way for it to be knocked out of of commission as the essentially is the Pistons running whatever kind of Europe we were going to have post-war it had to have Germany playing a major role so the morgenthau plan' to to post war planners looking a little bit further than just a few months down the line looked unrealistic implausible certainly something that would be very difficult to put into operation to carry through it would have meant turning back the clock on a highly industrialized advanced society and nation 30 or 40 or 50 years these were I mean Roosevelt and and Churchill brilliant as they were may have may have not have thought through the economic consequences in quite the depth that we would have expected the morgenthau plan' never really had a chance the if I may add something also bill you got one where we're all responding to it this is actually I remember one professor I had in European history say this is a 500 year old dilemma the dilemma of how do you have an economically strong entity in Central Europe to assure the prosperity of Europe without having that entity rampage militarily across Europe Assistant Secretary of War John J McCloy at one point in the war said these Germans have to be taught that they can't rampage across Europe anytime they feel like it um and we're and yeah and this debate just went on and on and on and I will close the circle on Marshall because in preparing vol 6 of the Marshall papers which have to do with the Marshall Plan the revitalization of the German industry is central to the success of the Marshall Plan which is one of the reasons not the only reason by a long shot Stalin says no way no way we are going to do this and it's it's a long-term problem but you know what is your focal point is your focal point the economic health of Europe or is your focal point the security side of Europe the American answer comes out to be you cannot separate the two by the time you get to the Marshall Plan that if you want a peaceful Europe you must have a prosperous Europe and have a prosperous Europe you must have a peaceful Europe I would like to also make one of the comment about wills paper he made of I thought a very very good point that everyone should keep in mind we are always coming up with new information we there is always more to be learned about World War 2 about any event in in our history there's this this myth Oh once we you know we've got all the facts we know everything that is the end of it that's not the way history works you always have new questions to be asked because every generation that looks at the past is asking different questions about the past in light of its own problems and it in turn leads to new sources as well point out these sources have always been there the classic example that I use women's history ok major field of study when I was an undergraduate there was no field known as women's history does that mean the evidence wasn't of course it was there it had always been there but no one conceptualized that field of study until the 1970s when the women's movement searching for a usable past did so so in terms of the war I think what will is doing here are asking different questions which in turn enable him to find new sources sources that have not been used before and in turn the more of those sources he finds the more questions there are sorry to tell that every point I would just say well history changes the way we do history changes the documents are there the evidence is there but the questions that we bring to it are often different in each generation the kind of book that I wrote is probably not a book that you might have written 30 years ago because it does in a sense it is in conversation with with many other kinds of work on the impact of war on society in many different places in different times this is a subfield that's growing in the general field of military history write it in it in in no way it seeks to to dethrone the central focus of military history which is on both operations but also on leadership and on grand strategy those are the central preoccupation and they should be but wars are about alas killing large numbers of people and if we lose sight of that we really aren't are missing are missing the the central aspect of this catastrophe that the Second World War was certainly for for all of the globe Joanne do we have time for any more questions one more okay looking back historians can identify certain key decisions that were pivotable that made things either much worse for much better can you identify anything that's going on today it might be making things Oh rats I thought you were going to ask us for our favorite World War two decision yeah I will keep politics him no I've got a wonderful answer for that when President Clinton was impeached I received a call from the local newspaper saying how will this look in ten years and I said that depends on what happens over the 10 years and he said that's exactly what one of your colleagues said to me a few minutes ago but he added a quip as my colleague always did historians do not predict the future historians predict the past thank you all very very much

Channel: GCMarshallFoundation

Views: 489,816

Rating: 4.1565075 out of 5

Keywords: World War II, History, Museum, Panel

Id: 79KU997m9o4

Length: 88min 22sec (5302 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Rittermeister]

This is the ultimate authoritative take-down of so much of the crap we ourselves wrestle manfully with.

[u/[deleted]]

I just want to take a moment to point out that bangin' brooch the brother is sporting.

[u/[deleted]]

This needs to be filed under myth-busting resources. Excellent find.

[u/Chris1396]

This is a great video, good find!

[u/[deleted]]

This is great. Thanks for the procrastination material (seriously).

[u/fiddle_n]

This is one and a half hours long and I'm a lazy person. Could anyone tl;dr this for me? (I guess in this case it's tl;dw).

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Thank fuck for that.