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

In trying to put together a logical reading list which will give me the greatest possible and most accurate understanding of WW2 as a whole i find myself scratching my head in puzzlement.

Nearly 70 years have passed since the war ended and since then it has been the subject of massive study by governments and individuals. Thousands of books, museum exhibitions, TV and radio shows have tried to dissect it and millions of forum posts have discussed it and yet it is hard to find even one small corner of the conflict for which you can say here is the definitive story as best we can understand it, let alone a complete history.

For any small aspect it seems necessary to cherry pick from multiple different publications, and then settle for your own personal interpretation of "how it was and why" (while still thinking you need to go back to source and check dozens of things).

Why is this? Is it even reasonable to assume that it is possible? It is, of course, one of the most momentous worldwide upheavals that has ever been seen but then it has attracted (it seems) a similar level of study and interest.

Off the top of my head i would think:

*The disproportionate quantity of fighting on the eastern front and the lack of archival access to Russian materials (and hence over-reliance on German records and memoirs)?
*Competing national pride and political interest post war?
*Lack of data (or too much data locked into dusty cupboards accessible only to the few)? Too much data?
*The effect of massive stress on personal recollections?
*Poor scholarship.
*Trying to sum it all up in one 400 page volume for those with a passing interest?

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on why we seem no closer, whether it is possible and whether there is presently any small part of the conflict which has been thoroughly covered and placed into it's context to the general acceptance of the scholarly community from which i can start my reading list on firm ground.

My thanks for at least reading that screed.
J

 

I think the closest you're ever really going to get in printed form is the Oxford Companion:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0192806661
And that, by it's very nature Will remain partial and incomplete.

Subject too large, controversies ongoing, massive complexity.
I'm glad it's complicated, and has yet to gain a 'unified theory', though when I think about it, I can't think of any other period of history that has yet found a universally accepted viewpoint. Orthodoxies, yes, but even those are rightly overturned from time to time.
Eg. I'm currently embroiled in a discussion about Pikemen elsewhere - twenty different viewpoints and no consensus after several weeks.

Ain't history great...

 

I confirm. Small stories make the big ones and many ones are discovered every day. One example is when I bought a gasmask canister with a name tag on it. Under it there was a Felpost number. This allowed me to find another name, a place, the story of a unit, thos who fought them and so on.... If history was written in marber once for all , it would not only be sad, but dangerous too.

 

stories don't show the big picture and the big picture leaves out too many stories

 

Thanks, first of all, to all those getting through that first post without your head hitting the keyboard. Also to those that may be prepared to do so again with this one!

The Oxford companion does look outstanding. It also looks large enough that someone's missus might be taking it down the charity shop to get it out of the way, so i hold out hope it may come my way in the future.

I was not necessarily looking for a single volume nor something that would stand for all time without revision, i agree that would be foolhardy in the extreme. I've been reading books regarding ww2 for over 20 years (in a general interest hobbyish way admittedly) yet there is nowhere i feel i have a good enough grasp to follow new developments and update my knowledge from a secure anchorage as new information becomes available. Nor do i see any way to get there.

I think part of my puzzlement is a lack of contact with the Primary sources. Although the war was massive historians seem to compartmentalise their study into small areas and i imagine the who, where and with what is recorded in detail in the archives. On the principle of "standing on the shoulders of giants" i would have expected to see at least some drawing together of disparate positions on the small scale (for instance i have been poking around Falaise recently and seem to be going round in circles).

Is the greater framework to hang these smaller actions on even agreed upon (even in the most basic terms)? It does not seem so. Too often it gets bogged down in who was best/ who did the most, inter-nation/service squabbles. This seems a pointless excursion as you cannot separate the parts. It was an Allied victory. There does not seem to be the need to shy away from giving a dispassionate weighting to events. I also see small segments which look brilliantly researched extrapolated without regard to the greater context.

As i said in my introduction to the forum i am not a historian or academic (i'm sure it is obvious too ) but i would like to start putting my reading into a form which produces greater understanding of the whole. In my naivete i thought i could acquire a few volumes each on the Political framework and political personalities of the combatants, their grand operational doctrines, the economic and logistical considerations they were faced with etc and then start to hang individual campaigns, actions and events onto this frame as information became available.

I've rewritten this so many times i hope it has at least a semblance of coherence. I don't think i am expressing myself very well, and for that, apologies. Ain't history great... Couldn't have said it better.

 

Some OTHER problems off the top of my head...

1/ Only a relatively small number of people committed their memories to print in the years immediately after the war; after that first flourish of memoirs, they had to be seen as commercially viable before they would be published. By the time the Internet came along...there were simply far fewer veterans available than in previous decades to fill in their particular gaps.

1/ There's a lot of records...even official ones...STILL confidential or in private hands/collections.

3/ a lot of public records have simply been weeded out over the years, to permit more practical storage. It's anything but unknown for people to request files at the National Archive at kew in the UK for isntance...and find nothing except an index page of what USED to be in there!

4/ And then - there's the issue of period intentional destruction! The Luftwaffe managed to destroy a third of EVERYTHING it had on paper in the last weeks of the war...

5/ Finally - and one not to be underestimated - as an example, what learning of the existence of ULTRA brought us in terms of re-analysing many and various wartime events - we have to KNOW there's something lacking from or something not quite "right" about the accepted historical record before we go looking for it.

 

Many charidee shops already have a copy for a couple of quid, perhaps for that very reason...

Destruction & ULTRA good points, Phylo. Despite being a modern period, much remains masked by the very nature of the cataclysm. (Good idea for a thread there - 'What is lost?' I'm sure some of the 2T Archive obsessives would have some strong views on that...)

What you're getting into, J, is the core problems of any Historiography.
It'll be Elton, Evans etc. next, Objective vs. Subjective, which is the point in a Uni history course that you think 'oh bloody hell, this is more confusing than I hoped'.

 

EDIT: In reply to Phylo (posted at same time as VP)

All good points sir. My thanks for helping in my education! I can well believe number 3...
I suppose it does make you wonder what is in the papers still classified this late in the game. How cheeky to keep Ultra under wraps so you can flog countries a cipher you can read!

Does anyone know whether there was an effort by academic institutions to study the war in it's immediate aftermath or was this considered too recent/ people were too war weary?

 

Lol! Yeah, which was kinda why i was hoping some other poor soul had sorted it by now and i could just read it. I don't expect you chaps to go through all that. Carr - What is history and "Geoffrey Elton - the practice of History" Added to the top of the reading list. I might blag the local uni into giving me their undergrad reading list....

It would be good to sort my own thought processes out before i delve into those of others. MANY thanks. This helps so much.

 

If you pick even a small sliver of the war for research you'll find very little agreement on anything. I've been collecting data on just one American Division and even within those official records the discrepancies are enormous. A Company files a report to the Battalion, and the Battalion summarizes or even changes the details to accord with their view, and sends another report to the Regiment. The Regiment does the same thing before forwarding to Division. By the time it's "official record" it has very little resemblance to what the Company Commander originally reported.

Further, if you find anecdotes from the men who actually did the fighting, those accounts will often not have much in common with what the Company Commander reported.

To take it a step further, if you find German accounts of the same action, they'll differ completely from what any American reports say. For example, the American (or German) report may declare that they routed a company of the enemy. When you find the enemies report, you find it was only a platoon and they executed a planned withdrawal to a new line.

The macro view of the war is flags moving on a map. How those flags moved is almost always lost in the fog or war. If you have 100 men engaged in a battle, you'll have 100 different opinions on what happened.

 

From what I've seen it usually takes anything up to twenty years for "modern" history at degree level to contain "current" events; you're more likely to get up-to-date events coming in with a course with some amount of field research - thinking of the work Peter Hennessy had his research students doing in the late 1990s into British Cold War installations and plans. So I would doubt that universities began active research and publication on WWII subjects and issues until into the 1950s at least.

 

One other thing....

History is actually rarely lost "from scratch"; as I've noted, sometimes you get to ONLY see the tracks left where it USED to be, in files before they were weeded out etc. But at least you know it was there at one time

Very often what has happened is that relevant parts, the material that really DOES fill in the blanks, needs to be pieced together from OTHER sources or official archives....often from completely unrelated subjects/departments/ministries!

A good example is all the work done on acquiring information on Britian's wartime defences etc. carried out by the Defence Of Britain project, English Heritage, professional AND amateur and local historians etc., etc...and often the material they would really want isn't where they think it is it's gone from where you'd expect it to be...in the War Office files!

Instead, for example, the Ministry of Works' files have in many cases proved to give details on who was contracted to build what when and where, who was paid, how much was paid etc.!

It's often still there - there aren't REALLY missing jigsaw pieces that will never be found...it's just that the jigsaw pieces are sometimes in entirely the wrong box


I've an example of my own; a few years back, in the course of trying to track down stuff on the early U.S use of the Galapgos Islands in late 1941 BEFORE Pearl Harbour, it became obvious that SOMEHOW U.S. flying boats flying from and patrolling the western approaches to the Panama Canal Zone were managing to refuel in the Islands quite a while before any FORMAL U.S presence in the archipelago! I even managed to track down the movements of a couple of USN seaplane tenders in, out and around the Islands...the firmly-Neutral Ecuador-owned islands ...in November 1941, and came to the unproved personal conclusion that they were either refuelling the flying boats, OR were delivering stocks of aviation fuel to the Islands! In major contravention of Ecuador's Neutrality...

And there it sat for a while - until I ALSO made the discovery that a certain Paul J. Foster, Cngressional medal winner in the First World War and soon again to be recalled as Admiral Paul Foster...applied for permission from the Ecuador government to lease sulphur mining concessions and establish a flying boat landing and a raadio station on Albermarle Island in the Galapagos! In the summer of 1941...

At the time I thought BINGO...of course!....but then, once again, for ages I couldn't find out if he ever GOT his leases!!!

Some time later I was given a reference in State Department records that I could view online that showed that not only did the U.S. State Department GIVE Foster half the investment money he needed...his leases were granted in September 1941...EUREKA!!!

...only to discover very quickly that the Ecuadorian government THEN pulled them again BECAUSE of his State Department links! I was thoroughly back to square one...

A few nights later I was reading through the State Department reference I had been given, and browsed forward a few pages from the Paul Foster reference...

..and discovered that the State Department had, in the autumn of 1941, come to a full AND COVERT agreement with the government of Ecuador to BUY aviation fuel actually IN the Islands, and to make arrangements to store more there! Which I presume was what the seaplane tenders WERE doing after all - delivering it!

There's NONE of this recorded in any USAAC file pertinent to the Panama Canal Department; there's nothing in any file pertinent to the defences of the Panama Canal Department, there's nothing mentioned in ANY record or history of the 6th/Carribean Air Force, the USAAC command in the PCD, there's no mention in any record or history or memoir to do with USN operations in the PCD NOR USN air patrol out of the Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone....and there's NO mention of the agreement AT ALL in the main "official history" on the U.S.' defence of the Americas.

It's buried in, of all places, the State Department files....and ONLY the State Department files. And nothing to do with the Panama Canal Department - it's in the files concerning relations with the Ecuadorian government!

And that is often how history is "lost" - it's not...it's just where noone would ever EXPECT it to be Or know to look...

 

Some excellent replies.

Frankly I did not have much interest in WW2 until about three years ago. Then I read a book which had a battle in which my father was involved.

For 70 years he would avoid any discussion, but now when it is all almost too late he provided me with one or two facts which did not fit the accepted reports (not earth shattering of course but still wrong).

Since then I have tracked down and read every scrap of information British and German - thanks to the internet got in touch with a son of a Royal Artillery man - added his data - plus some additional stuff from a very kind French man also contacted via the web.

Realised that there there two chateau and not one, and now believe I have the most (sorry one can never be sure - more) compete answer but still not perfect. At the bottom of one newspaper article from 25 years ago he wrote "my belt filler was killed here" but I have tried all the names I can find and he just can't remember.

The result is that I read every account of a battle with a pinch of salt - if a little one like this one is incorrectly reported what happens with a major offensive with all the mega egos determined to show themselves up in the best light.

Sites like this are a godsend and with lots of data out there, the fun is sticking it together to make intelligence. So for us amateurs there is still work out there.

I am currently trying to build a complete picture of 23rd and 24th May 1940 - not as easy as one would think given the fact that the SS took and destroyed many of the French records and all the Allied forces are in a higgledy piggledy mess but out of this a defence was solidifying.

Now what was the original question?

 

Some cracking responses while i have been slumbering. Thanks all. Ill let them sink in and kick start my brain before getting back to you.

 

John Keegan once wrote a fascinating little book called "The Battle For History: Re-fighting World War II" It is the story about the writing of WW2 history. Still time to order if for Christmas.

 

http://www.scottmanning.com/content/50-books-on-world-war-ii-recommended-by-john-keegan/

Or if you want to go direct to Keegan's recommendations - here is a list.

Can't say I agree with them all

 

Oooooooh...ditto!

 

I'm not sure there are any discrepancies. Jeff's (Mr. Sanders) book is about the 30th recon which is a very unique slice of the war, very different than the infantry companies I'm focusing on.