Rethinking World War Two: The Conflict and its Legacy by Jeremy Black (review)

Jeremy Black, does not shy away from ambitious projects: here he endeavors to distill understanding of the Second World War as a global conflict in a concise 200-page monograph. Engaging with the latest English-language historiography, he explores how scholars have conceptualized and conceived of the conflict since 1945 until today from the vantage point of politicians, generals, the media, and national cultures. His central premise is that: "For World War Two, there are many accurate views, numerous inaccurate ones, and a large number of problematic accounts" (p. xi). He argues both that domestic politics of the conflict strongly shaped the politics of the memory of the war and also profoundly influenced the very divergent ways in which different cultures have remembered the conflict. Indeed, he argues, sometimes the disputes over the memory of the war have eclipsed the controversies concerning the conflict's actual course and character.

The first part examines the origins of the war and the years of Axis success. This coverage is wide ranging and includes subordinate satellite partners and the perspectives of neutral states as well. The politics of coalition war fighting and grand strategy are then explored. Following this is a wide-ranging survey of the domestic politics of the major belligerents that encompasses issues such as collaboration and resistance. In his usual refrain, Black emphasizes the need for sensitivity to contingency in history and to avoid the temptations of teleology; though Black himself is not immune from using the benefits of hindsight in emphasizing that the West deluded itself to the threat posed by Nazism, for instance.

Next he explores issues linked to how and why the Allies eventually won, including resource superiority, military effectiveness, command ability, and adaptation to changing wartime and battlefield realities. Here Black appears to echo his University of Exeter colleague, Richard Overy, in his emphasis on contingency and the courses of events rather than inherent resource superiority, though this was an important element, Black acknowledges. In his examination of Allied grand strategy, Black vigorously defends the utility of Churchill's indirect approach through the Mediterranean. Such grand strategy discussion is contextualized in domestic political terms: he argues, for example, that there was greater popular enthusiasm for the war in Nazi Germany than conventional wisdom contends.

Hereafter follows a nation-by-nation examination of the evolving postwar attitudes toward the conflict. Here again Black surveys widely incorporating minor players alongside the major protagonists. He emphasizes that the recollection of the war is a manifestation of politics by other means. Black continues by examining future possible trends in the historiography of the Second World War from various national and regional perspectives, emphasizing how the final passing of the Second World War generation may generate important future attitudinal changes. Black provides valuable comparison between the wartime strategies of the belligerents and their postwar justifications. In doing so, he firmly rejects moral relativism: he spurns attempts to impose moral equivalency between the Allies strategic bombing campaign that killed large numbers of civilians and the Nazi extermination camps. He does warn that the progress of time was likely to further color the perceptional distinctions between good and evil among future generations. He also rejects the popular notion of the war as a struggle between democracies and dictatorships, during which democracies mobilized more effectively.

As for the obligatory quibbles, the work is neither the first scholarly attempt to examine the evolution of different national interpretations of the conflict nor the first to focus on the memory of the war. Instead it is an impressive, engaging, informed synthesis replete with thoughtful, insightful observations. Yet it hardly represents a fundamental rethinking of the Second World War. Moreover, readers familiar with the author's extensive publications will find repeated arguments that he has made in other works. Some might also think that how the war in the United States has been recalled and has developed receives insufficient treatment in comparison to how...