Why do we not yet have a complete history of WW2?

Consider that just one author will soon have a set of 3 large volumes dealing with one battle (Glantz's Stalingrad trilogy) and the scale. Especially when at least some think that his work isn't defintive on the topic.

 

You don't get wisdom from counting the paper clips. Big ideas are better than overwhelming detail. Try The Great Crusade by H. P. Willmott. Essential understanding of WW2: the Germans could fight battles, but not win wars. Allies were a true alliance: information sharing and joint staff work from January, 1941! The Axis was a propaganda stunt; no real collaboration between Germany, Japan, and Italy.

 

And consider: eye witnesses won't even remember the same details surrounding something as simple as a car accident, That is something simple and factual. Then consider that a big part of WWII discussion is motives; something even fewer people will agree upon why someone did something. Its not even certain that the person doing the act, has sufficient self-knowledge to understand why they did what they did, and is even less likely to admit what their motives or decision making process was, honestly.

A definitive history will never exist. That is what makes history so interesting: it borders between factual, physical and the emotional, psychological: Not only What happened, but Why it happened.

 

I would like to start out by saying thank you to all those have contributed once again. I have found your posts interesting, intelligent, thought provoking and in some cases quasi-philosophical. It is impossible to give likes to them all but know that is the case, if i could respond to you individually i would.

I may address reading list materials in another thread and instead devote this response to why i instinctively rebel against some of the opinions put forward. I am quite sure this derives from ignorance and i would beg your understanding that i am not trying to play devil's advocate for the sake of argument or entertainment but to try and further both my understanding and explore how this massively important event can be understood better by the whole as i believe it is a worthy and useful goal.

I've tried to frame a response a few times which is the reason for the delay in my reply. In the process I have ended up trying to write a methodology
through which production of such a tome may be accomplished. This has proved quite effective in persuading me of the difficulty of the task and the validity of your replies. However i still do not yet accept that the complexity of such a task makes it an impossibility nor an unreasonable goal. Especially when i look at the fabulous array and quantity of resources both human and technological we now have to throw into the breach.

I should at this point say that when i talk about a "complete" history i accept whole heartedly from the reasons shown above that there will always be room for debate, some things may never be known, are lost forever, or will, when all is said and done, still come down to a matter of opinion. Perhaps what i mean is "latest". I may even go so far as to say my definition of the complete WW2 has already been written albeit by a thousand authors in penny packets.

I wonder whether more emphasis should be put on the objective goal of finding all the available data for any or all given subjects before authors decide to convey their own conclusions or opinion. Archives and primary sources are still seemingly the preserve of the few despite the possibility of widespread digitisation and the means for mass dissemination. There seems no co-ordination to disparate projects where efforts are underway to allow access. Nor does there seem to be much attempt made at cross-cultural understanding.

Does the present commercial model of competing authors serve the truth or does it encourage the husbanding of data to the detriment of the whole and premature conclusions? Is there a better way, in the digital age we live in, to convey the sum total of our endeavours. It seems to me true progress would only occur through reconciling different viewpoints, if only by including these different views in one work (or at least bloody acknowledging they exist, along with the cold sources (even if they are conflicting) and allowing the reader to decide.

Such a work would be large, yes, but larger than the status quo of hundreds of books per subject with no reference to the whole or each other? A base model kindle could now hold all we know about WW2 if it was properly collated. For those that have extensive libraries, do your books show a convergence towards understanding and progression in proportion to archive revelations or is an unnecessary amount of time expended on debate which could be better spent finding more triangulation points from which to allow people to make up their own mind?

I suppose this then leads into subjectivity. To what degree is there peer review between the leading authorities in each field currently? We can now share our thoughts with a worldwide cross-cultural audience and gain instant feedback made ever easier by the increasing utility of digital translations.

Yet my impression is we are we all still mining separate coalfaces and flinging our products into the infinite, instead of working together. The more i read the more confused the picture. This is obviously a factor of disparate subjective factors which can never be reconciled but also that when new things come to light it is just another book on top of the pile to be referenced against a hundred other works existing in a vacuum and still based on incomplete examination or location of sources.

The process as it stands is fascinating, yes, provides endless reading, yes. But do our present efforts and methodology actually get us anywhere or are we just entertaining ourselves by running in circles? I have doubts about the efficiency of the process. As much as i like entertainment; i would prefer progress. And if progress there is, i would like it to be available rather than each expert and author being his own repository of the subjective total of his learning.

As it was an allied victory i would look to an allied evaluation.

My apologies for the ramble. I am sorry i could not do justice to your replies with a more coherent explanation of my thoughts or wait until my grasp of historiography was improved. I am sure it shows. Everything i have written may well just be a product of my lack of methodology in study and un-academic brain. I will not take offense at being told as much.


My thanks once again,
J

 

Ah!...the flaming arrows in battle alight with the perpetual question of how can one know objective history when it involves people and subjective thoughts?

Some thoughts about how to prepare for the task ahead and methodology....
1) Don't turn away from each person's viewpoint, but embrace it. See it for what it is: read the communique or document they analyze and see what conclusion they reach from it. Do you agree or disagree? If not, look up your view on google and see what others say about it. Approach it like a tapestry except there are many loose threads. Go the distance for each loose end until you are satisfied. Only at the end will you be able to piece it all together. And even then it will only be your viewpoint.

2) Based upon #1 above, be comfortable with the thought that any history of WW2 will be a combination of hard facts and soft interpretation (that is, interpretation that is subjective).

3) Before wanting to know about WW2, become knowledgeable about individual issues. In other words, don't bite off more than you can chew. Take little bits at a time and know the essential questions, issues and interpretations before moving on.

4) Appreciate the various perspectives. As you know, a Russian's view on things will be very different from an Englishman, or American. May I suggest a book called A People's History Of The United States by Howard Zinn. The methodology of the book is to tell famous historical episodes of the U.S. from the viewpoint of the conquered. So the expansion of the Western U.S. might be explained by Indians, the General Motors Sit-down strike of 1936-37 from the point of view of the workers, etc. It was written with the thought of history is told by the victors in mind. Many people might not agree with his viewpoint but the methodology of how different people see things is extremely rewarding, in my opinion.

5) You talk about 'whole' conclusions, and reconciling different viewpoints. You know Einstein searched and searched for the unified theory formula but never found it Maybe you should proceed from the viewpoint that not only won't there be a single history but there shouldn't be? After all, how can you find a single reference point when it's a moving target?

 

EDIT: This has turned into a huge post, apologies for not being more succint. I won't be surprised or disappointed if this goes unread.

I actually think you do a good job of spelling out how to get closer to that goal (better than i did). The writing of a complete history is a fallacy. I surrender that point, its an impossibility. Having said that, I think trying to work towards such a goal would be more beneficial than rejecting it entirely. I think where we disagree is to what extent experts are following the points you have made and to what extent laymen can follow this model.

Thanks for the tips, although i'm about to argue with it, they are very valuable. I am slowly getting more comfortable with no.2. I would interrogate you regarding balance though. There seems to me a lot more interpretation and interpretation of interpretations than there is a presentation of what was documented with discussion of its merits. Lets at least find what threads there are before we try to tie them up.

99 times out of 100 i have found it impossible to view the original document being analysed. I don't want to reject peoples views, but i do think that a lot of unnecessary argument can be eliminated by examination of the primary. An off the top of my head example is Monty "winning the Bulge". I've read probably a dozen opinions on this in books and there are thousands of thread's dedicated to it. What staggered me though was it was incredibly difficult to find a copy of his press release in full! Millions of contributions on the subject and only 1 or 2 of those actually thought reading what he said might have been a good idea for people to make their own conclusions. For me that clarified the (non)issue more than all the collected "analysis" of individual parts of it.

I would put it to the community that over rejection of objective history and embracing the subjective has led to the present state of primary sources still being unfound, unread, unavailable and has led to wasted energy which could be more profitably used to move toward greater understanding.

Should the first stage not be the collection of evidence and its presentation? With digital storage, web distribution and the ebook format i no longer see much excuse for just presenting the odd sentence from a report. How many billions of pages have been digitised in out of copyright books? Is there a concerted effort to make what we can know available? I have not come across it.

In books (or t'internet) i never find a list of:

What primary do we have - Where is the latest list, for any given small subject, of the sum total of the efforts of countless historians to find contemporary documents and accounts etc?
What are the potential problems with this primary - primary evidence will often lead to conflicting conclusions or just state conflicting things, yes, but often they may point to an almost inevitable conclusion if we find enough references.
What is inaccessible - I think this is my biggest bugbear, for the layman it seems the great majority.
What has gone forever - I still haven't started that thread VP...
What "we dont know we dont know" will always have the power to chuck a spanner in the works and lead to re-evaulation.

There is plenty of room for debate and scholarship without arguing about the picture before all the pieces of the jigsaw are on the table.

Good recco. On the list. Once again i agree wholeheartedly. Where i disagree is i don't see those writing the books doing enough of this. I can read a book from a half dozen different national standpoints but I cant say i've really come across people trying to put them together. Its left to the reader to collect all these assorted perspectives then try to find the often inaccessible sources. It seems there is more emphasis on the reader to follow best practice than there is on the pros. I know it is tough to be dispassionate but surely its easier for the professional scholar who has all the material?

Maybe i'm reading the wrong books. Maybe i'm reading the right books wrongly.

Again i try to present this question to the authors in my library as well as myself and find both lacking. We still get an avalanche of very general overviews on broad subjects rather than broader analysis on small areas. Where the broader analysis is available there is still no scholarly effort to then contextualise this by experts in the larger picture.

Pah! Rank amateur! I'll have it cracked by lunch and still have time to comb my hair! I jest to try and show everything i have said so far comes not from arrogance but ignorance. If i have missed the point - and i suspect i may well have - the fault is all mine.

In the Ven diagram of World War 2 i think we should be adding circles to narrow down areas of argument to where they can be most useful rather than rehashing old arguments based on incomplete or tunnel-vision study of source materials.

I think my present standpoint is: there will be no single history; there shouldn't be and that we should work towards this goal in the most orderly way possible nonetheless. As much as i like a good argument, i prefer a better and more complete comprehension which is why i sincerely thank you for your ongoing education of an ignoramus.

 

Without wishing te be contraversial...Sorry for another thread....but ww2 will never have a consice written ending...when we cannot as a whole even decide on when ww2 began. But that is probably for another debate.

 

My congratulations on managing to read my tosh. If you don't want to be controversial I would be happy to "stick it on my tab" as i am quite sure i have already made a fool of myself and I think that fits rather nicely in what i tried (badly) to say about a greater framework. I think there are definitely issues of a much more fundamental nature to be explored before the devil can be pulled out of the details. It makes me think about the Eastern Front, which for many years i was completely oblivious to ( at least in terms of sheer scale). It now seems ludicrous to exclude that from even seemingly unrelated aspects.

On a side note, if Santanalysis 2013 is correct i may hopefully have some greater insight into the Stalingrad portion of the East at least.

 

I think the Eastern front was too far big a subject for most of us mate....It took me years to even look at it. It has to be looked at as a different war never mind theatre in my view...i'm just glad that when I decided to look at it there was more information and more writers around to expand on it. Beavor grabbed me with Stalingrad and opened my eyes. It still takes a lot of imagination and determination to get engrossed in the Eastern front. But I feel its an area I personally will never get to grips with.

 

I see it as a movie, Hollywood style. A football team in Colorado who spend most of their time screaming "WOLVERINES!" and driving hotrods while trying to look like James Dean, all join the service. Half join the marines and go to Hawaii to bang Wahini's then ship out to defeat the Japanese - about five minutes of gut-churning action with tommy guns. The rest go to England, bang every girl between 16 and 40 then invade Europe leaving a trail of dead Germans and pregnant French girls who all look like Juliette Binoche.

You might have to throw in a sub-plot with somebody flying to the eastern front with a load of spam and telling them to cheer up and get on with it. In the background, you could have some Brits and commonwealth types drinking tea, calling each other "Guv-nuh" and bumming Lucky Strikes from the GI's.

The climax would be the clandestine invasion of the Bunker by one of the Wolverines, who shoots Hitler in the head with a .32 then has a threesome with Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, who can't resist his James Deanish charm.

 

ok back to reailty , to be honest i dont think that there will ever be or can be a truly consice "complte" history of WWII. and for much the same reasons that WWI and even many other earlier conflicts still dont have full histories written.

 

Me too with the Eastern Front. But the historiography is fascinating and perhaps is connected with the point of this thread. If Beeveor were to step off a plane today in Russia, he would immediately be arrested - see the intoduction to the latest reprint of 'Stalingrad'. The Russian archives were opened to Western historians only briefly, and are now closed again. There's already much discussion going on about how the history of WW1 will be 'viewed' in 2014 with historians such as Overy concerned that it will all be poets and trench 'experience' rather than any broader lessons being learned.......

 

Disclaimer: I have been down the pub.

As my nearest library copy of Carr is apparently 10,500 miles away with a back-up copy 11,400 miles away, i feel compelled to poke a stick back into the wasp's nest. Blame whichever passing madman voted it a 5 star topic. I will try to be brief.

Going back to my original question of: "Is it even reasonable to assume that it is possible?". There have been very good points raised which entirely convince me that it is not (although I am still not ready to accept that this should not be the stated goal we try to work towards).

That being the case, could i try to move the discussion on by asking for opinion on the following:

1. what is/are the most universally agreed upon chapters of the war from a point of view of best understanding? It's probably best to edge my unwise mention of the East to one side. This may help to clarify my thoughts on objective v. subjective.
2. Are archival efforts to release the primary being coordinated properly and are they getting enough/proportionate attention?
3. Does historiography have to adapt to the new technologies we have in the 21st Century?

Kodiakbeer - I suspect i am being taken to task there, but you sir, have yourself a film! Thanks for the light relief. It was needed. What are you doing with all your Pearl Harbour screenplay money?
MartinBull: My copy of Beevor-Stalingrad is turn of the millenium. I can't see any difference in preface when using the Amazon look inside for the 2007 edition. I'll look into the WW1 Overy et al debate. Might help with the old education and prove relevant to this journey.

 

In other words... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill:_The_Hollywood_Years

 

Just checked - it's the 2011 edition which has the new preface which gives an overview of how research has moved on from when the book was originally published and includes a brief critique of Glantz' revelations concerning Operation Mars.

 

Thanks Mr.B!

 

Your talking about a conflict that was world wide. This is something where the entire Iraq war for example would just be one theater in a greater larger conflict. The scale and size is just.. well world wide. But a big part of the problem is every country puts their own spin on it. (Victor writes history).

Heres an old saying. People often argue about how wars start, but few argue about how they ended...

 

Well,it is my conviction that it is possible to write a concise and reliable history of WWII in less than 100 pages .Of course,this would require to throw away all the garbage and superfluous details and to write without hyperboles ,exagerations and wishfull-thinking