HISTORY STARTING FROM THE BEGINNING
By David H. Lippman
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Anybody with a calendar and a sense of time knows that the name of my day-by-day history of World War II is hopelessly out of date. The series was designed to be timed to the 55th anniversary of the Second World War. That timing disintegrated in 1995, along with my Navy career. Since then, I've slowly added to the series, but at the same time, questioned my own methodology. I have presented a story that starts in the middle, which is no way to tell a story. You have to tell it from the beginning. I have been assailed on that very fact for the last few years, in e-mails from readers who all want to know the answer to one of three questions, sometimes all at once:
2. Why doesn't this start in 1939 3. Do you think that World War II started in 1941 just because that was when America was attacked? Well, the answer to the first question is the endless issue of this series. As soon as I find the time, support, and energy. As I constantly point out, this operation is a one-man show. No grants, no teaching assistants, no publishers, contract. I have to research and write every single word. I don't mind that, because it means I can keep my vision. The only comment I've ever had on my work from any government agency was that US Navy saying it was "a load of crap." So says Uncle Sam, who never makes mistakes. So I doubt there will be any grants, let alone applause, from that corner. So my readers have to wait until my crushing work deadlines are met, until I've picked up my daughter from her day-care center, until I've emptied out the dishwasher, until I've put away the laundry, and done 15 miles on the exercycle. However, the second and third questions are tougher to answer. Sometimes my interlocutors berate me at length for starting the series in late 1941, and accuse me of being a junior "John Wayne." Others assail me for that usual purpose: to ridicule me and get my attention. My usual answer is this: I am very well aware World War II began in 1939, unless you're Japanese or Chinese, in which case it began in 1937 with the unbelievably horrific destruction of Nanking and many other Chinese cities. However, one could say that World War II began in 1936, when Hitler marched into the Rhineland. Or in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Or in 1931, when the Japanese took over Manchuria. Other historians say World War II properly began with the end of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. And still others regard World Wars I and II as the same war, split by a 20-year truce. In that case, World War II might actually start with the Serbian crisis of 1914. Or the Agadir crisis of 1910. Or even the Prussian victory over France in 1870. Schoolbooks neatly divide people and events up by chapter and era, with a quiz on Friday and a test the week after that. Life is far more messy. It is a fact of cinema that the place one starts a story is right before the end, using the back story to reveal everything that happened before. That logic applies to the telling of history as well. An account of the last voyage of the battleship Yamato, for example, would start with the ship's departure, then might flash back to the dreadnought's construction. Then flash forward again to the battleship's demise. World War II, however, is a larger canvas. And as I plodded through the details of the battles of Guadalcanal and Stalingrad, I also realized that I was, in a sense, misleading my readers. This isn't a history of the war, it doesn't start at the beginning of the war. I simply dropped a bunch of battles and characters onto a stage like a pile of bricks. They seem to be assembled well, but they're a pile of bricks all the same. We should know why Dwight D. Eisenhower was picked to lead the invasion of French North Africa. Or why Guadalcanal was such an important island. And the 55th anniversary of the war is long gone. The necessity of tying this project to anniversaries has expired. It's almost embarrassing now. We're in the 60th anniversary of the war, and that'll be over in two years. I was and remain bothered by existing errors and deficiencies in the existing entries. I left out and botched up an awful lot. HMS Exeter never sank. Charles Upham earns his Victoria Cross in the wrong battle. And I left out the attempt to censure Winston Churchill. When would I clean that up? When I expanded my web page to an additional site, which includes my columns, I gained a new audience. So I decided to test democracy. I ran a poll in the Wild Bill Guarnere discussion group, which consists of fans of World War II and the mini-series "Band of Brothers," which is therefore a good sampling of my target audience. These folks have devoured my existing material and are typical of the types of people who would want to read more. I asked readers three choices:
2. Should I start over in 1939? 3. Should I just edit my existing entries? The answer was small in terms of total votes, but a pretty thumping percentage. It was as follows:
2. Start from September 1939. [26 - 68.42%] 3. Rewrite the existing entries. [0 - 0%] I know a lot of politicians who would like a 68 percent to 31 percent majority. However, as British MP James Burke and Georgia Continental Congress delegate Dr. Lyman Hall observed, "A representative owes the People not only his industry, but his judgment and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion." Hall thus justified his personal view that Georgia should sign the Declaration of Independence while his constituents still opposed independence. In other words, I could veto the majority vote. But this vote made sense. The story has to start at the beginning, and when it comes to the end, end. That makes for greater clarity, builds arcs, makes for narrative flow, and I can organize the material. So I made the decision right after the Yankees won the American League East. After the World Series, I would go back to 1939 and start over. Go through the war from Warsaw to Nagasaki, and re-write critical entries from the 1941-1942 period when I got up to them. What I am doing, then, is writing this as I felt it should be done in the first place, like any book or heroic epic, from start to finish. I am beginning with a preamble, which is a meditation on the war as a human experience and an introduction to some of the characters who will be seen and followed. It will follow with chapters on the last week of peace in August 1939 and the road humanity took from the woods at Rethondes and the 1918 Armistice to the radio station at Gleiwitz in 1939, where Hitler's stooges created the great lie that ignited the war. And then I will follow the conflict from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945. And if I live to finish this, there will be following chapters to tie up the loose ends of war and looser characters. Some of the days World War II was fought saw little action, and I will use those spaces and times to flesh out additional stories that belong to no particular date, such as the corruption of Germany, or the role of women in America or Russia. The style and the focus will remain the same: fans of the USS Washington will get to see her career from commissioning to scrapping. The same holds true for other familiar groups, like 2nd New Zealand Division, HMS Warspite, USS Enterprise, and the 7th Armoured Division. We'll also be introduced to some new folks: HMS Hood, KM Scharnhorst, and Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, justly acclaimed as one of the war's great light infantry companies. If I slight or short specific aspects of the war, all I can do is apologize. I don't have unlimited funding. I don't read Russian, Japanese, or even German too well. I cannot trace the history of every mess kit repair company, every fighter plane, every POW escape. In 1970, Thames Television Producer Jeremy Isaacs faced a similar problem when attempting to put World War II into 26 hourly episodes for the Imperial War Museum. He had a fair-sized budget, access to 60 million feet of Imperial War Museum archival footage, and a team of researchers, interviewers, and camera folks under his command. These hard workers were able to pin down and interview such critical people as Karl Doenitz, Albert Speer, Bill Mauldin, John J. McCloy, and SS bigshot Karl Wolff. Isaacs had Dr. Noble Frankland, a top historian and director of the Imperial War Museum, write down 15 must-have campaigns, which went into the series, along with an episode on Burma. The latter made the cut because of its unique and dreadful conditions. Determined to convey aspects of the war's human experience, like comparing life in Britain and Germany during the war, or the occupation of The Netherlands (as a typical occupied nation), he had to sacrifice numerous campaigns and battles. Yugoslavia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and East Africa were slighted. Another problem Isaacs faced was that many of the key battles went unfilmed. There is very little video footage of U-boat battles in the Atlantic or night naval actions in the Pacific. Many other battles were only filmed by newsreel camera teams, which meant that they got plenty of shots of preparations for battle and results thereof, but not as much footage of actual fighting. Then as now, men who lugged heavy cameras onto a battlefield were endangering their lives for the historic record. Another factor in the wartime newsreel footage was that it was heavily censored and edited before being aired in the Odeon or the UFA-Palast. German newsreels emphasized the glory and triumph of the Wehrmacht as it stormed across Europe. There is ample footage of diving Stukas, panzers roaring across the countryside, and goose-stepping infantry strutting through Paris. There are fewer shots of German troops surrendering at Falaise or SS Einsatzkommandos massacring civilians in Russia. Josef Goebbels' newsreels were designed to send particular messages. So were the British and American newsreels, albeit different messages. British newsreels faced possible German invasion in 1940 with sarcastic humor and insouciant wit. American newsreels and documentaries avoided showing gore, dead bodies, or wounded men. They stressed production and the purchase of war bonds. That was the struggle a crack team of researchers and documentarians faced, armed with a budget, cameras, tape recorders, and hefty credentials. I lack all of those. Nor can I interview many of the folks highlighted by Thames Television. They're nearly all dead. So are other folks I would have liked to have interviewed, like Charles Hazlitt Upham, Johnnie Johnson, Mitsuo Fuchida, James Van Fleet, and Lester Hashey. The eyewitnesses are dying off at a high rate of speed. So if doing the war was difficult for Thames Television, it's going to be one heck of a challenge for me. But it's one I think I can take up. What I lack in brains, I make up in determination. What I lack in credentials, I make up in writing ability. What I lack in terms of firsthand interviews, I can make up from researching a variety of sources. Naturally, I have also made decisions on what to cover and how to handle it. As I have written in my other essay on this page, there are subjects of World War II that personally interest me, like Colditz Castle, New Zealand's role in the war, and the use of airborne forces. I also have certain non-revisionist revisionist opinions. I regard Field Marshal Montgomery more highly than most Americans. I do not accept the revisionist view that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sacrificed the US Pacific Fleet and American lives to gain America's entry into the war. And I don't care what David Irving wrote, I reject the work of a man who represents himself as "Adolf Hitler's ambassador" to the present. My other concerns are those of history and remembrance - which are not the same. History is about analysis and judgment. Remembrance is about honor and respect. They both teach vital life lessons, and they often come together. They both have enormous value. But they are not the same. I will try to straddle both concepts, in honoring a generation and its sacrifices, while understanding what caused those sacrifices. We hope to give our readers a more comprehensive study of the greatest war and drama in human history, covering the conflict from the Barents to the Antarctic, from London to Eniwetok. And we hope that everyone who reads this comes away with some understanding of the war, the forces that were at work, and most importantly, the people who made history for 2,175 of the most dramatic and decisive days in the history of our world. Perhaps this will give my readers some understanding of how we got where we are, as all knowledge is based upon the past, as we can only guess the future, as Barbara Tuchman observed, by noting the direction of the water from the lantern on the stern. To my readers who are hoping to see how the battles of November 1942 come out, I apologize for this delay. To my readers who want to see the war from the start, you are getting your wish. To all of my readers, I say the following: I hope you enjoy the ride. |
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