Books

Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp. Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Ask and ye shall receive! This is a groundbreaking book, as far as the English language is concerned: I know of no other treatments of the bombing of either France or Italy at this length. Of course, it could be argued that there's only half a book on each here, but I suspect the comparative approach will be very fruitful. I'll probably be most interested in the chapter on preparing for bombing in the interwar period, but it all looks good. Incidentally, this is the latest output of the prolific Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project centred on the University of Exeter; only last month its members took up an an entire issue of Labour History Review; and I see that Richard Overy has a book coming out next year entitled The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 -- so now I have something else to look forward to!

Lizzie Collingham. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. London: Penguin, 2012. An agrarian interpretation of the Second World War. This has received rave reviews from all over (including one from the aforementioned Richard Overy). I do wonder if the pudding has been over-egged as far as the blurb is concerned: I doubt that the claim that 'the necessity of feeding whole countries led to Germany's invasion of Russia' can be sustained, unless 'led to' is to be read as 'contributed to' rather than 'caused'. Still, looks very interesting.

William Feaver. James Boswell: Unofficial War Artist. London: Muswell Press, 2007. A few months ago Ruth Boswell emailed me about the Sudeten crisis posts I wrote in connect with a film script and novel she is working on. It turns out that not only was she the producer of the classic 70s SF show The Tomorrow People which I watched as a kid but also is the widow of James Boswell, a New Zealand-born artist I blogged about when Airminded was still young. The reason I wrote about him was a claim on the Tate's website that his (very evocative) lithographs entitled 'The Fall of London' were commissioned for Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly's Invasion From the Air (1934), which was and is my favourite knock-out blow novel. While Ruth obviously wasn't around at the time, she tells me that James later said that they had been done for a young Communist Party member, who never turned up to collect them. That doesn't sound quite like either McIlraith or Connolly, from what I know of them (Connolly was an Australian journalist and editor who worked at Labor-affiliated newspapers; McIlraith, again either from Australia or NZ, may have had connections with the left but I haven't been able to pin him down; the book doesn't read as straightforward pro-Communist propaganda, though I suppose it is anti-fascist), which I must admit is a bit disappointing. But I am consoled by Ruth's very kind gift of this lavishly-illustrated catalogue (published by her own press) of James's wartime work, done while serving in ARP and the Army in London, Scotland and the very different landscape of Iraq. His observations of service life are particularly keen, but also some quite disturbing and somewhat surreal nightmare images. There's also a bit on his prewar output for Communist newspapers, including a great one published in Left Review in April 1938 with appeasement serving as a particularly flimsy 'Chamberlain' air raid shelter, entitled 'Design for dying'.

John Mueller. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaeda. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. I added this book to my bibliography just this week, tagged 'get'; and then found a very reasonably-priced paperback while browsing in a bookshop. Who am I to argue with fate? There's no doubt that there's a lot of nuclear alarmism about but I wonder if he's talking it too far: one chapter argues that nuclear weapons have only had a 'modest influence on history' and if that's the case, why bother writing a book about it? Then again as a recent discussion here has confirmed I have no business forming first impressions of books without having read every last word...

Keith Robbins. Politicians, Diplomacy and War in Modern British History. London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994. Another serendipitous and even cheaper find. A collection of essays, many previously published in fairly obscure places, mostly on Victorian and Edwardian diplomacy with a couple each on the First World War and interwar periods. The most interesting ones for me are three on foreign policy and public opinion and/or the press and/or pressure groups, and one entitled 'Britain in the summer of 1914'. Bonus: the cover has a photo of Sir Edward Grey with a bird on his head.

Ian Kershaw. The End: Germany 1944-45. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Decided to wait for the paperback edition when this first came out, a safe enough bet where Kershaw is concerned. Among other things, should be useful for placing Dresden in the wider context of what else was happening in Germany in these months.

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi. What's Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney: New South, 2010. Unlike Anzac's Dirty Dozen, this takes aim at the place of the Anzac myth in Australian society, and what it leaves out, rather than questioning specific aspects of the myth itself as Stocking's collection does. So there are chapters which look at the use of Anzac Day in schools, or ask why it has such emotional resonance; a couple of more overtly historical ones look at anti-war sentiment both before and after Gallipoli. And it's more of a political polemic, too, than Stockings's edited collection, which is more historiographical in scope. And while both volumes are written by academic historians, none of the contributors here (except for Carina Donaldson, a PhD student who for some reason doesn't get a co-author credit for the book itself) can be said to specialise in military history.

Philipp von Hillgers. War Games: A History of War on Paper. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012. Really only traces one strand of the history of wargaming, the abstract 'German' one which passes through 19th-century Kriegspiel and not the boardgame-style 'American' one or the 'British' miniatures one (not that these aren't abstract, or purely American or British for that matter). But it's the oldest one: von Hillgers starts with medieval rithmomachia and continues through various proto-wargames from early modern Europe. He finally pitches up at German general staff wargames in the interwar period. The phrase 'Hilbert space' seems to occur more frequently than I would have expected (von Hillgers is a historian of mathematics). Has a curiously strokable dust jacket.

Richard North. The Many not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. I picked up this book with high hopes, but a few pages in my heart is starting to sink. It's looking like a polemic masquerading as history. It has its origins in a Battle of Britain post-blog, and although more research has been done it retains a chronological format, from 10 July to 31 October 1940. Nothing wrong with that; my own (far less extensive!) effort made me look at the received narrative of the Battle in a new way too. And I like the shift in focus from the aerial battles to the effects and perceptions on the ground: I have argued before that we need to consider the Battle and the Blitz as an integrated whole, not artificially divide them as has been done for the last seventy years. The July raids are particularly neglected, as is everywhere outside of London, so I look forward to North's treatment here. But so far most of the breathless claims of a radical new interpretation appear to be, well, nothing new. The working-class 'occupation' of the Savoy Hotel's shelter. The RAF's overestimates of combat kills. The struggle over opening tube stations as shelters. Four of sixteen plates are devoted to air-sea rescue -- apparently the idea that the Germans were much better at this than the British is a new one, even though I seem to recall coming across it in just about every book on the Battle I've ever read. The bibliography is patchy at best; it's okay on recently-published work, but there are many books I'd expect to see which are missing (no Calder's The Myth of the Blitz? no Titmuss or O'Brien) and some I'm surprised to see (three by David Irving, for example, though only one is about a Nazi so maybe it's alright). Lots and lots of URLs (including Airminded, it must be noted) but no peer-reviewed articles. The prewar context is given in about one page ('the bomber will always get through', Things To Come, Guernica). As for the central thesis, that the bravery and suffering of the millions of Britons under bombardment which was the real key to victory has been forgotten and even 'stolen' -- really? I know North has heard of the 'Blitz spirit' because he has an entry for it in his index, so I'll be curious to see what he can mean by this. Seems to me the idea is quite thoroughly entrenched in British culture by now. Anyway. I don't know much about North, who has a PhD in (I think) political science, but all his previous books appear to be as polemical as this so this, usually with an anti-government theme, so appears to be more of the same. But we'll see.

Virginia Nicholson. Millions Like Us: Women's Lives During the Second World War. London: Penguin, 2012. Disappointingly, not the novelisation of the film. I haven't read her Singled Out -- I think the 'lost generation' thing is a bit exaggerated -- but the Daily Mail liked this one a lot, and that's good enough for me.

Craig Stockings, ed. Anzac's Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History. Sydney, NewSouth Books, 2012. Again, I never did get around to buying Stockings's previous edited collection, Zombie Myths of Australian Military History, but this is potentially even more interesting. Whereas that book critiqued myths surrounding individual battles and campaigns, this one takes aim at bigger, deeper myths: that our military history began at Gallipoli (Craig Wilcox), for example, or that our lack of conscription in the world wars made us superior warriors (John Connor), or that our soldiers were wasted in sideshows in the last years of the war against Japan (Karl James). Some are things I've touched on here before: for example, Stockings's own chapter attacking the idea that we are always fighting other people's wars and Dale Blair's on Australian wartime atrocities. I can see I'm going to like this book. But I must register some churlish complaints, too. It's disappointing that although there's a chapter on Australia's missing naval history (Alastair Cooper) there isn't an equivalent one about airpower, despite the head of the RAAF's Office of Air Force History being among the authors (Chris Clark, who here writes about New Zealand's very different interpretation of Anzac). And it's also disappointing that while Stockings criticises blogs (and Wikipedia), along with newspaper supplements and popular histories, for perpetuating these myths 'as never before' (2), none of the authors appear to have any substantial web presence; nor does the book itself have a website (although, oddly, it does have a suggested Twitter hashtag in the colophon, #anzacdirty12). Given that the book is explicitly aimed at popular ideas about Australia's military history, this is a missed opportunity: Google is the key battleground for memory now.

Peter Williams. The Kokoda Campaign 1942: Myth and Reality. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012. This is one of those topics I should know more about, being a military historian and an Australian and all. Ordinarily I might be wary of a book with 'myth and reality' in the title, but it's unlikely to be sensationalist revisionism as it's published in association with the Army History Unit. In fact it is based on Japanese archival sources as well as Australian ones, which Williams uses to show, for example, that the idea that Australian forces were massively outnumbered (thus excusing the bits where we got beaten) is untrue.