War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)

Niall Ferguson. _The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West_. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. lxxi + 808 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $18.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-14-311239-6.

Reviewed for H-German by Talbot Imlay, Département d'histoire, Université Laval, Québec

An Awfully Bloody Awful Half-Century

As a historian, Niall Ferguson is in a class by himself. He is the author of several best-selling books on topics such as the First World War, British and American empires, the role of money over the past three centuries, and the Rothschild banking family. Along the way, he has presented several television documentaries related to the subjects of his books and has written scores of editorials, book reviews, and articles for prominent newspapers and magazines. But Ferguson is not merely a successful--not to say, the most successful--public historian. Also to his credit is an academic monograph on politics and business in Hamburg during the opening three decades of the last century as well as an important edited collection on counterfactual (or virtual) history. If this were not enough, Ferguson has also published and continues to publish articles in leading academic journals.

As befits someone of Ferguson's talent and energy, his latest book offers a panoramic study of war, conflict, and violence during the first half of the twentieth century. As with most of his earlier books, this one is ambitious in design and wide-ranging in scope. Its arguments are often convincing, sometimes provocative, and occasionally frustrating. The book, in short, is eminently readable despite its considerable length. Following recent scholarly trends that underscore the dark, not to say, catastrophic history of the twentieth century, Ferguson sets out to explain why its first five decades experienced such high and, indeed, unprecedented levels of violence and especially death. The answer, he argues, lies in three overlapping factors: ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires. The presence of these three factors distinguishes the period from earlier and later ones, and the changing mix of the three accounts for the variegated nature of the violence, whether in terms of place and time or in terms of the identity of victims and perpetrators. This variation notwithstanding, Ferguson suggests that the period should be viewed as a whole, as a "fifty years war" (or "war of the world")--one defined by multiple, sometimes overlapping regional conflicts that overflowed the temporal boundaries of 1914-18 and 1939-45. To this schema, Ferguson tacks on an additional argument concerning the decline of the West: the twentieth century, he insists, witnessed a transformation in world politics marked by the rapid end of western dominance over the East (Asia), a process due in no small part to the rippling effects of conflict and war ...

REVIEW: David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century

H_NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by: H-Diplo (April, 2008)

David Reynolds. Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007. xi + 544 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-06904-0.

Reviewed by: Antoine Capet, University of Rouen.

Hard Life at the Top

David Reynolds is, of course, a well-known author to H-Diplo subscribers, if only for his magisterial In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004) and his superb collection of earlier essays From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (2006).[1] His latest offering focuses on "modern summitry--made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction and made into household news by the new mass media" (p. 36).[2] The first encounter between statesmen which met that definition was in Munich in 1938, the object of chapter 2 (chapter 1 examines the evolution of meetings between kings and emperors since antiquity). Neville Chamberlain unwittingly gave the perfect justification of these personal meetings during a sitting of the cabinet before he undertook his first trip to Germany: "you could say more to a man face to face than you could in a letter" (p. 49). But then--and it is a constant theme of the book--the personal dimension can be a very dangerous one, sometimes turning into what Reynolds terms "a battle of egos" or "a test of virility" (p. 6).

Reynolds offers a very interesting discussion of the origin and implications of the word "summit," arguing that Winston Churchill's famous remark on February 14, 1950--"It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit"--has to be replaced in the context of the conquest of Mount Everest, then a national obsession (p. 1). But then when Chamberlain arrived at Berchtesgaden on September 15, 1938, he still had to "climb" to Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg aerie ("Berg" meaning, of course, "mountain" in German). "In a startling and almost literal sense, Mahomet goes to the mountain,'" a percipient New York Times journalist wrote (p. 455). Thus, what Churchill saw as a metaphor had in fact been a real-life experience for Chamberlain, and not a happy one if we accept Reynolds's verdict on this first visit: "By taking the Czech crisis to the summit, the prime minister had exposed Britain's status and prestige to an alarming degree" (p. 65). Yet, of course, "none of Chamberlain's cabinet was willing on September 17 to sacrifice London for the sake of Prague" (p. 63). On September 22, at Bad Godesberg, on the banks of the Rhine, Chamberlain was spared another literal "climbing of the mountain," but not a metaphorical one, and, at the end of the unpleasant meeting, "having staked his political future on the success of summitry, he had climbed too far to turn back" (p. 74). So, he went to Munich and came back triumphantly with the undertaking never to go to war again against Britain, which he had personally asked Hitler to sign during a private meeting. Everyone is familiar with the rest of the story. "Summitry had made Chamberlain's name and then destroyed it," Reynolds pithily concludes (p. 102) ...

REVIEW: Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-War (July, 2008)

Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by: Mark R. Hatlie, History and Government Program, University of Maryland University College, Europe Division.

War and Memorial Culture

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn.

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable ...

REVIEW: Jeffrey R. Smith, A People's War: Germany's Political Revolution, 1913-1918

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (September, 2007)

Jeffrey R. Smith. _A People's War: Germany's Political Revolution, 1913-1918_. Lanham: University Press of America, 2007. 213 pp. Bibliography, index. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7618-3642-1.

Reviewed for H-German by Jason Crouthamel, Department of History, Grand Valley State University

Locating a Vernacular Revolution in German History

Germany's defeat in 1918 is often seen as a political rupture that resulted from social, cultural, and economic crisis that fragmented a traumatized society, making it more susceptible to the rise of National Socialism. Jeffrey Smith's new book argues that historians need to revise their perception of November 1918 as a moment of "disunity" in response to a lost war. Instead, he sees 1918 as a culmination of a growing "nationalist vernacular sphere," a movement of popular activism that unified Germans across social and political lines, shattering the monarchy. The term "revolution," Smith argues, should be applied to the 1913-18 period as a whole, with the war as a catalyst, rather than a rupture, in facilitating the expansion of this "vernacular public sphere." Ultimately, he suggests, the mobilization of popular activism in a struggle to wrestle sovereignty from the kaiser constitutes an underlying continuity between the _Kaiserreich_ and the Third Reich (p. 21). Relying on police records from Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg, as well as newspaper accounts of imperial authorities' clashes with citizens, Smith claims to avoid the rather narrow focus on nationalist pressure groups and elite political leaders found in the enormous historiography ranging from Fritz Fischer and Hans Ulrich Wehler to David Blackbourn and Geoffrey Eley (p. 8). In a thorough overview of this scholarship, Smith boldly claims to "overcome the inherent shortcomings of the revisionist historiography" by demonstrating that new links between the state and society were being forged since 1914, with citizens seizing political initiative in ways that replaced Wilhelm II's authority with that of "a newly enfranchized German _Volk_" (pp. 8-9). However, the significance of Smith's own argument needs to be further developed, as his goal to provide a "third view" of this watershed period, distinct from the scholarship of the 1960s and 1980s, could be more fully realized. Though Smith makes an interesting attempt to write a history of German politics without becoming engrossed in the machinations of "the state," his conception of the "vernacular public sphere" needs to be defined with more nuanced argumentation and more effective use of primary sources ...

REVIEW: Robin Neillands, The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)

Robin Neillands. _The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 292 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0253-34781-7.

Reviewed for H-War by Jean Morin, Independent Scholar

A Flawed Plan from the Start

Robin Neillands is a prolific author who has made many names for himself in many genres and whose output defies boldly the confines of time.  As well as having written perhaps ninety books under various _noms de plume_, he has become one of the most popular military historians in the book market of the last decade.  His study _Bomber War_ (2001), was outstanding.  Sadly, Robin Neillands died last year at the age of 70, not quite finished with a biography of Montgomery.

His book on Dieppe was among his last.  It is one for which he was well qualified, having been a Royal Marines commando himself and having befriended such luminaries in the field of _coups de main_ as generals R. D. "Titch" Houghton and Peter Young (DSO [Distinguished Service Order] in
Dieppe), who shared memories with him of their own involvement in cross-Channel raids during the Second World War, including that of Dieppe. Neillands has obviously had personal experience in learning to plan such operations or walk the talk of the commando, and his book is professional
and sensible.  The British commandos did well on the periphery of Operation Jubilee and one gets the impression that this Dieppe study wants to make them shine ...

REVIEW: Andrew August, The British Working Class, 1832-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)

Andrew August. _The British Working Class, 1832-1940_. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. ix + 286 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $33.40 (paper), ISBN 0-582-38130-4.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Dennis Dworkin, Department of History, University of Nevada

In the 1960s and 1970s, the working class--and particularly the British working class--had a special place in historical writing.  It was at the center of the new social history and history from below, in large part because of E. P. Thompson's enormously influential _The Making of the English Working Class_ (1963).  Yet, Thompson's book built on a tradition of radical historiography in which the British working class was important to the historical process broadly conceived.  It was the world's first industrial proletariat and central to Karl Marx's understanding of the historical dynamic of capitalism and the transition to socialism.  The British working class's experience had universal implications.

Certainly, much has changed since the heyday of the new social and labor history.  The end of communism, the rise of identity politics, the decline of the labor movement, the advent of post-Fordism, and a host of other changes have contributed to a declining interest in the working class within historiography.  As a result of the impact of the linguistic turn, the new cultural history, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies, the fields of labor and social history are less central than they once were.  Yet, at the same time, there has been an outpouring of theoretical discussion that has revised our understanding of class, and historians have produced a more complex and nuanced picture of British working-class life.  The theoretical transformations have been analyzed at length, including by me in _Class Struggles_ (2007).  Andrew August's _The British Working Class: 1832-1940_ is a highly readable overview of British working-class history that builds on the achievement of numerous social, cultural, and feminist historians, while deploying numerous primary sources to make its principal points ...

REVIEW: Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children's Fiction in the Second World War

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (March 2008)

Owen Dudley Edwards. _British Children's Fiction in the Second World War_. Societies at War Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. vi + 744 pp. Illustrations, figures, index. $200.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-1651-0.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Stephen Heathorn, Department of History, McMaster University

Too Many Fairies and Not Enough Tale

If one word could possibly sum up a 744-page book, then in this case I would have to say it would have to be "indulgence." I must admit up front that it took me a long time to read Owen Dudley Edwards's _British Children's Fiction in the Second World War_, and despite the interesting topic, I am not sure it was worth the effort. It is not that Edwards writes poorly or has little of interest to say. On the contrary, every page is filled with learned allusions, wit, and genuine insight, and his primary research has been prodigious. The problem is that this research and the insights gleaned
from it are not presented in an intellectually disciplined manner. Edwards has crammed into his book every last fact, every last supposition, and every last connection he has discovered in the course of reading his sources. This indulgence--and that of his editors and of the press--makes for a massive and unwieldy tome that, unfortunately, is sometimes rather tedious to wade through. The indulgence in description, extensive quotation and allusion--and, frankly nostalgia--where explicit argument and synthesizing analysis were called for, diminishes the impact of what might otherwise have been an excellent book.

Although the works of over a hundred authors are mentioned or discussed in passing, the key protagonists of Edwards's tale are really Enid Blyton, W. E. Johns, Richmal Crompton, E. M. Brent-Dyer, and Frank Richards. The others--including such literary heavyweights as J. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and George Orwell--are more or less the supporting cast, discussed to illuminate specific issues rather than the main theme of the book. That theme can be summarized as follows: the war was a time of relaxed or absent parental control, and British children inhabited a world, therefore, in which they were particularly susceptible to the messages of the popular literature and commercialized juvenile culture on which they, by necessity of parental relaxation/absence, relied to make sense of their world. So, Edwards's argument--implicit in a number of statements spread through the book rather than explicitly detailed--is that children's fiction, especially that of Blyton, Johns, and Crompton, provided "resources" for children to "manage" their experience of war. I find this instrumental view of children's literature a more contentious proposition than does Edwards, and because he does not explicitly explore or defend his argument empirically or theoretically, I do not find that his view ultimately carries much conviction ...

REVIEW: Barbara G. Friedman, From the Battlefield to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (March 2008)

Barbara G. Friedman. _From the Battlefield to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946_. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2007. ix + 134 pp. Bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0826217189.

Reviewed for H-War by Jenny Thompson, Curator of Education, Evanston History Center

Women's War

During and immediately following World War II, one million marriages between American soldiers and women from countries other than the United States took place. In Great Britain, where two million American soldiers were stationed or passed through during the war, the inevitable
"fraternization" between GIs and British women constituted a concern for the U.S. and British governments, a newsworthy and debated subject on the American home front, and a real experience for thousands of men and women caught in the realities of a world at war. By 1947, 70,000 British women had left England for the United States to join their American husbands, most sailing there on "bride ships." The U.S. government's passage of the War Brides Act in December 1946 paved their way to enter the United States as non-quota immigrants (p. 97). Barbara G. Friedman, assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the subject of British war brides by examining how their stories were presented, interpreted, and ultimately, "co-opted" (p. 2) in British and American mass media.

Drawing from a variety of disciplines including history, sociology, and communication, Friedman's book is an excellent chronicle of media coverage of the war bride phenomenon, both in the United States and Great Britain. It is also a fascinating study of related issues, including U.S. and British attitudes and experiences during the war, dominant discourses on sexuality and marriage, and the ways that fears and concerns about women's roles during wartime played out in the public sphere ...

REVIEW: Gerald E. Shenk, "Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Minerva@h-net.msu.edu (October, 2007)

Gerald E. Shenk. _"Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 194 pp. Notes, index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-6175-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4039-6177-8.

Reviewed for H-Minerva by Richard S. Fogarty, Department of History,  University at Albany

Drafting Conformity

With the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1917, the United States adopted a new system of conscription to meet the challenges of full participation in Europe's Great War. While the U.S. military actually needed less than 10 percent of eligible men to serve in uniform, officials believed that the exigencies of modern total war required the utilization of all of the nation's productive capacities, both military and economic. The resulting policies, vividly distilled in the slogan "Work or Fight," sought to ensure that every available, healthy American male contributed to the war effort through uniformed service or labor deemed necessary to the prosecution of the war. However, Gerald Shenk's study of the draft during the First World War shows that the officials who administered the system, and the people who supported it in unofficial capacities, sought not only to mobilize the nation for war, but also to ensure "that millions of other men and women work to sustain the existing social order" (p. 2). In short, "the fundamental goals of draft officials at the local, state, and national levels were to protect privileges associated with property, patriarchy, and white supremacy, while providing men to fight the war" (p. 153).

Shenk's work is not a general history of the origins and operation of conscription during the war,[1] but an attempt to write "a multilayered portrayal and analysis of what the draft meant to Americans of all kinds where they lived their daily lives in their homes and communities" (p. 4). In particular, he investigates how the workings of the Selective Service System revealed the roles race, gender, and class played in American life in the early twentieth century, and how local attitudes about these issues affected the administration of conscription policies. To that end, Shenk has taken a case study approach, focusing on the implementation of policies at local and statewide levels in Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and California. The author employs this methodology presumably because it provides broad national coverage--of the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West--though he does not spend much space justifying this approach or explain fully why he chose these states, what makes them representative or good choices for closer examination. Still, the strength of the approach is to set these state and local stories against the broad background of the national war
effort, and the wide-ranging regional coverage allows the author to draw conclusions at both the macro and micro levels ...

REVIEW: Anthony Clayton, The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (February 2008)

Anthony Clayton. _The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present_. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. xiv + 335 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. £9.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4058-5901-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Keith Surridge, Independent Scholar

The British Army is now constantly in the news owing to its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has generated much interest in the troops themselves and recently the army has been the subject of several television documentaries. One that will air soon features a former soap opera actor embedded with a particular unit. The involvement of Princes William and Harry in the army, both of whom have successfully trained as junior officers, keeps its media profile high. Moreover, retired senior officers have been publishing their memoirs; the most recent, and perhaps outspoken, is that by General Sir Mike Jackson, _Soldier: the Autobiography_ (2007). His trenchant views on operations in Kosovo, and especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, caused much comment in the press. Thus, a book that seeks to explore the British army officer from earliest times to the modern era is timely.

With recent events in mind, Anthony Clayton, a former lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in line with a lot of press opinion, points out that most politicians have no experience of army life. And, consequently, they have no understanding of the stresses and strains placed upon officers who have to meld individuals into fighting units and command them in combat situations. His book, therefore, seeks to give some idea of how officers have coped over the centuries with leading men in peace and war. Examining the role of the officer from the modern army's foundation in 1660 to the twenty-first century, Clayton discusses the social background of officers; their training and motivation; and how they have interacted with their men. Influencing all these is the peculiar nature of the British regiment, a "mutual obligation society" (p. 7), with its ancient traditions, that has no counterpart elsewhere ...