Abstract
Growing up as a child in London in the 1960s, surrounded by veterans of the armed forces or the home front, it was impossible not to be aware of the Second World War, or ‘the War’, as everyone called it. A precocious reader, I first read serious books on the War at the age of ten or eleven. Since then some interpretations of the War have changed radically. New ideas, interpretations and revisions of existing notions are appearing all the time. To take examples from my own field, as early as the mid-1980s I was influenced by scholarship demolishing the ideas of German blitzkrieg and that the Red Army's victory was the product of brute force and ignorance. Likewise, the simplistic but comforting notion that in 1940 Britain stood ‘alone’ against Germany has been dismantled. More broadly, the edges of the War have blurred, with the emergence of the thesis of a new Thirty Years War (1914–1945), or an even longer period of conflict that encompassed decolonisation and the Cold War. Moreover, fields such as gender and race have assumed prominent roles in the historiography.
The sheer dynamism of research into the Second World War poses particular challenges to works such as this Oxford Handbook, a handsome volume with thirty-four chapters, all by expert contributors. To my mind, this type of book needs to do five things. First, it must provide an accessible and up-to-date survey of the scholarship, reflecting debates, alternative interpretations and schools of thought. It should not attempt to produce a bland synthesis. Second, it should make scholarship on non-mainstream topics accessible, particularly in languages which are unfamiliar to Anglophones. Third, it should act as a jumping-off point for further research, and so chapters need reasonably extensive reading lists in addition to detailed references. Fourth, it should be inclusive. It should not deal, for example, with military history to the exclusion of cultural history. Nevertheless, I am firmly in the camp that says that attempts to discuss a conflict without extensively engaging with political and military history are deeply flawed. Fifth, the editors’ introduction must provide a general overview and lay out the different lines of argument and indeed the inconsistencies within the book. How well does this book measure up to this ideal? The short answer is that it succeeds in some respects but not in others, but for all that it is a very worthwhile publication.
Inevitably, editors and contributors must make choices about what to include and what to leave out. While I applaud the inclusion of a non-mainstream chapter (by Peter Garretson and Stephen McVeigh) looking at Ethiopia, and one on the Spanish Civil War, it is a shame that events that are central to the wartime experience of both Italy and the British Empire, the battles of El Alamein, are barely mentioned. Similarly, Tobruk is mainly mentioned in the context of a discussion of medicine in war. This neglect of key aspects of the Desert War means that much high-quality scholarship is ignored, which falls foul of my first requirement.
In terms of chapters acting as a gateway for further reading, bibliographies range from the four-and-a-half pages accompanying Peter Mansoor's chapter on the 1944–1945 Northwest European Campaign, to the less than half page following Gao Bei's chapter on the Sino-Japanese War, although this perhaps reflects material available in English. Andrew Stewart's chapter on Britain and the British Empire in 1940 (which, like the other two previously mentioned, is a fine piece of work) also has a short bibliography, although the literature on the subject is massive and the author is very familiar with it. This lack of consistency should have been addressed in the editorial process.
One of the strengths of the collection is the diversity of topics. Highlights include Neville Wylie's excellent chapter on neutral states, which incorporates a particularly interesting case study of Thailand. Similarly, both R.M. Douglas, ‘Reintegrating Veterans and Demobilising Population’, and Victoria J. Barnett's chapter on religion in the West are very thought-provoking pieces. Such chapters (among others) will be very useful for students seeking a way into topics that are slightly off the beaten track. However, as noted above, the distinctly thin treatment of some military topics is unfortunate.
It is also very sad that Judy Barrett Litoff, the author of what should have been a key chapter, on the Home Fronts, died before the book was published. Her piece, which reads as if it was not revised prior to publication, provides a useful overview, but at only thirteen pages in length it is lacking in the depth necessary to cover all the home fronts. Given the significance of the home fronts in total war (itself a concept that could have been accorded greater prominence), this was an odd choice by the editors. A subject this large deserves greater coverage, perhaps a chapter each on the Axis and Allied home fronts. No doubt it was because of a shortage of space that she did not engage with the concept of a ‘People's War’, one of the key, and increasingly contested, themes in the historiography of Britain in the War. The footnotes and bibliography omit most of the key texts on the British home front, including Angus Calder's venerable but still influential The People's War. It would have been helpful if the editors had updated the bibliography to include the recent works by Daniel Todman and Alan Allport, at the very least.
The editors’ introduction is a little disappointing. It includes contestable statements; for example, there is consensus that the war began on 1 September 1939. Actually, there is a very vigorous literature arguing that that is not the case. Indeed, Gao Bei argues in this very book that a much better starting point is 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Also, the editors, perhaps simply through loose phrasing, appear to suggest that the Second World War was the direct consequence of the conclusion of the First World War. Again, this is highly debatable.
These criticisms aside, the book delivers a number of fine chapters. Among them, Jan-Ruth Mills’ piece on the Holocaust is particularly important, for even now Nazi genocide is sometimes marginalised in descriptions of the War, when it needs to be at the very centre of it. Jonathan A. Grant's chapter on the Eastern Front 1941–1943 is significant for the same reason; it is good on the German Army's (and not just the SS's) participation in mass murder. Marc Milner's chapter on the Battle of the Atlantic accords the Royal Canadian Navy its rightful place. Charles Closmann's insightful piece on ‘The environmental impact’ of the War is an excellent introduction to what will, I suspect, be to many readers an unfamiliar topic.
Does The Oxford Handbook of World War II succeed in passing the five tests that I have set? Not fully – it is stronger in some areas than in others, and actually quite weak in a few places – but nonetheless it deserves a place on the bookshelves of all scholars dealing with the subject. It will also be invaluable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
