Revisiting The Second World War
A Podcast Series In 10 Episodes
Today's historians, informed by new archives and changed perspectives, now study WW2 in its global context and cast doubt on the standard accounts that are so familiar to us. Across ten in-depth episodes, they tell us how major aspects of this war have been under-played, exaggerated or simply got wrong.
It is now some 80 years since the Second World War (WW2) ended. Yet we still tend to see the conflict in largely national terms, which was how it was interpreted by most combatant countries in the decades immediately after 1945.
In the West, the narrative has been broadly a triumphant one, of the victory of freedom over tyranny. In Britain in particular, the ‘Few against the Many’ and ‘Britain Alone’ has played into a David-and-Goliath story of plucky underdogs succeeding against the odds. America calls WW2 the ‘Good War’, fought by its Greatest Generation.
But these narratives take little account of the wider global war, the complexities that such a huge conflict entailed, or the diversity of experiences and outcomes in different countries – big and small, occupied and free, winners and losers.
If you think you know about WW2, it’s time to think again.
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Episode 1
Britain Alone?
PROFESSOR DAVID EDGERTON shows how the traditional narrative of Britain's Second World War is seriously misleading. Britain was the richest nation in Europe in 1939 and lay at the centre of a huge global empire. It also, despite appeasement in the 1930s, maintained a thriving military-industrial-scientific complex throughout the inter-war period. These advantages would enable the nation to fight a resource-rich, technological war.
Episode 2
A World at War: Winning and Losing
PROFESSOR RICHARD OVERY explores the global context of WW2 to show how it transforms our understanding of the conflict - in particular, how it was lost and won.
Episode 3
The Pacific War
The American historian IAN W. TOLL, author of the monumental Pacific War Trilogy, offers new insights into the conflict in the Pacific, which has too often been mis-remembered as an army-led narrative when the real victories were won at sea and in the air.
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Episode 4
Food: A Matter of Life and Death
Social historian LIZZIE COLLINGHAM, author of the ground-breaking The Taste of War, explains how food and its delivery was critical to the conduct of WW2 - and could be a matter of life or death.
Episode 5
The Real Holocaust
PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN GERLACH, author of The Extermination of the European Jews, revises the dominant narrative of the Holocaust to explain a phenomenon that was far more complex and far-reaching than has been previously understood.
Episode 6
China's War
PROFESSOR HANS VAN DE VEN reveals a WW2 narrative that will be unfamiliar to most of us - China's epic war of resistance against Japan in the years 1937-45 and how it created the Communist giant that has become the global superpower of today.
Episode 7
The Underground War
HALIK KOCHANSKI is the author of the award-winning Resistance, a sweeping account of the underground war across Nazi-occupied Europe. She tells a much more complex story than usual of subversion, SOE, partisans and civil war, as well as desperate Jewish defiance.
Episode 8
The Soviet-German War
PROFESSOR GEOFFREY ROBERTS explores the lesser-known Soviet aspect of the Soviet-German War of 1941-45, a titanic struggle that's often overshadowed by an Anglo-American narrative of WW2. The Eastern Front was the decisive battlefield of the Second World War, with the Red Army imposing an eventually crushing defeat upon Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht. The fighting took four long years and was much more of a challenge for the Russians (their casualties far outstripped those of the Axis forces) than they would later admit. Yet without the Soviet war effort, Hitler might have prolonged the conflict or even fought to some kind of stalemate.
Episode 9
America's 'Good War'
PROFESSOR JOHN BODNAR, author of The 'Good War' In American Memory, explores the myth and reality behind the received American narrative that those who fought World War Two were the country's 'greatest generation', champions of freedom and democratic values. Proof, in short, of American exceptionalism. The reality was rather more complex, revealing a United States that was often deeply divided, cynical and violent during the Second World War.
Episode 10
Aftermath
The HISTORIAN KEITH LOWE, author of the best-selling The Savage Continent, discusses what happened in the aftermath of the Second World War, which had left a world in ruins, tens of millions of refugees, and a slide into anarchy and chaos, As the world was slowly rebuilt, this aspect of the war was forgotten - but it had a lasting impact.
News From The Front
A selection of new publications, webinars and other information relating to WW2 studies that might be of interest.
Coming Soon
Detail from Arthur Szyk's Murder Incorporated: Hirohito, Hitlerhito, Benito, 1941. Private Collection. JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.29324684'