King's College London
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives

Annual Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives Lecture

How the cold war froze the history of World War Two

Professor David Reynolds, FBA

given Tuesday, 15 November 2005

‘Anyone who delves deeply into the history of wars comes to realise that the difference between written history and historical truth is more marked in that field than in any other.’ Basil Liddell Hart struck this warning note at the beginning of a 1947 survey of historical literature about the Second World War. In fact, he felt that overall this writing was superior to the instant histories of the Great War a quarter-century or so earlier, mainly because ‘war correspondents were allowed more scope, and more inside information’ in 1939-45 than in 1914-18 and therefore presented a much less varnished portrait of warfare. Since their view was ‘better balanced’, he predicted ‘there is less likely to be such a violent swing from illusion to disillusion as took place in the decade after 1918.’ ¹

Despite this generally positive assessment of the emerging historiography of the Second World War, Liddell Hart did note ‘some less favourable factors.’ Above all, he said, ‘there is no sign yet of any adequate contribution to history from the Russian side, which played so large a part’ in the struggle. Moreover, he doubted that ‘we can expect very much by way of revelations from that vast storehouse.’ ²

Liddell Hart proved right, but for reasons he could not fully anticipate in 1947. Stated bluntly, the deepening Cold War froze our understanding of the Second World War in many important respects. A nd although the Cold War is now over, I think we have still not entirely escaped its frosty grip on the historiography of 1939-45.

Today the Eastern Front is a familiar feature of the Second World War. Anthony Beevor’s 1998 bestseller on Stalingrad brought that titanic and gruesome battle to popular attention as never before. Richard Overy vividly painted the broader canvas in his book Russia’s War and in the accompanying TV series, while the American scholar David Glantz has narrated the military story in great detail based on Soviet sources. Various volumes by John Barber and Mark Harrison describe and analyze the massive exertions of the Soviet home front, and Catherine Merridale has now given us a fascinating and moving study of Red Army veterans in her book Ivan’s War. ³

The magnitude of the conflict has also become clear. For the first two years the Eastern Front was never less than 2,400 miles in extent; by comparison, North African battles such as Alamein were fought across some fifty miles of desert and the whole Italian front was rarely more than 100 miles wide. During three years and ten months of almost continuous conflict, the Wehrmacht thrust 1,200 miles into the Soviet Union, and then the Red Army counter-attacked 1,500 miles to Berlin. Thus the western Soviet Union was a battleground not once but twice; cities such as Kharkhov and Orel changed hands several times. Total Soviet war dead totalled at least 25 million, compared with some 400,000 British and 300,000 American. In fact, more Russians died in the siege of Leningrad than the total British and American war dead combined. To state the point another way, between June 1941 and June 1944 – the three years between Hitler invading the Soviet Union and the Western Allies landing in Normandy – 93 per cent of the German Army’s battle casualties were inflicted by the Red Army. ⁴ These statistics put into a different perspective the preoccupation in Britain and America with Alamein and Tunis, Sicily and Rome.

None of this is to imply, crudely, that the Soviets ‘won’ World War Two single-handed. The Western Allies were fighting much more complex wars, by sea and in the air, and those contributions have to be weighed in the balance. ⁵ All I am saying here is that today no serious history of World War Two can ignore the Eastern Front. But that has not always been the case.

During the conflict itself, the Soviet struggle did receive considerable attention. In the second half of 1941 and for most of 1942 the British newsreels were full of heroic Red Army soldiers, whose exploits seemed all the more impressive at a time of mounting public discontent about the lack of a ‘Second Front’. The Russians were ‘the chaps who don’t talk but keep on killing Huns’, to quote one caustic letter intercepted by postal censors. In early October 1942 Home Intelligence reports indicated that Stalingrad had ‘almost become an obsession’, dominating public interest to the virtual exclusion of other war news, and in October 1943, the Sword of Stalingrad, a ceremonial gift from King George VI to the Russian people, was seen by nearly half a million people while touring Britain prior its presentation by Churchill to Stalin. ⁶

British fascination with Russia’s war was peaked in 1941-2 while there was no Second Front in the West. During 1943-4 the war in North Africa, Italy and eventually Northwest Europe naturally took pride of place in the British press and newsreels. Consequently the great tank battle at Kursk in July 1943 – which checked the Wehrmacht and then began the Soviet surge into the Ukraine – attracted much less attention because it coincided with the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily. Similarly, operation Bagration in June-July 1944 was largely eclipsed by the battle for Normandy, even though the Red Army advanced 500 miles in five weeks and inflicted double the losses of Stalingrad. Thirty German divisions were virtually eliminated: about the same number as Hitler was fielding in the whole Italian campaign. It was the diplomatic consequences of Bagration, rather than the military campaign itself, that attracted Western headlines, and for a sinister reason. The Red Army was now at the edge of Warsaw yet it gave no help to the Polish uprising against Nazi rule. In 1944-5 enthusiasm for the Soviets began to wane. ⁷

The war also generated some influential eye-witness accounts. A selection of Ilya Ehrenburg’s pungent war reports appeared in English in 1943, introduced by the novelist and broadcaster J.B. Priestley. The journalist Alexander Werth also produced some vivid instant histories. Werth, the son of a Tsarist politician, had fled St Petersburg with his father in 1917, but he was able to return after Britain and the Soviet Union became allies and his ‘Russian Commentaries’ on the BBC brought the Soviet war alive for millions of radio listeners. An edited version of his Moscow diary for July to October 1941 was published in early 1942, followed by a book on Leningrad under siege, built around his visit there in the autumn of 1943. In 1946 Werth published a more ambitious analysis, The Year of Stalingrad, mixing reportage and social commentary, which culminated with an account of his tour of the devastated city two days after the German surrender. ⁸

Werth’s writings reflected the balance of public interest, being skewed to the first, defensive half of Russia’s war. A more balanced if less readable history was the two-volume Penguin special on The Russian Campaigns, published in 1944 and 1946 by William (W.E.D.) Allen and Paul Muratoff. Muratoff was another exile of Bolshevism, a graduate of the Tsarist Military College and also an accomplished art historian. Allen was a war journalist and historian who had written extensively on Georgia and the Ukraine. Their books, based largely on reports in the Soviet and Western press, lacked a strong interpretive line and gave little sense of decisive moments but they did provide lucid narratives for the whole war illustrated by excellent maps. ⁹

In 1948 two single-volume histories of the Second World War appeared, by Cyril Falls and J.F.C Fuller, and both brought out the significance of the Eastern Front. Falls insisted that ‘the Battle of Stalingrad and its exploitation must be considered one of the most important victories of the war, if not the most decisive of all’ and he noted how the Red Army engaged at least two-thirds of the Wehrmacht and, from late 1942, a ‘considerable proportion’ of the Luftwaffe as it inflicted defeat after defeat on Nazi Germany. Fuller also did justice to the Eastern Front and, unlike Falls, he also highlighted Kursk, which he said was as significant for the Germans as the ‘catastrophe’ of Stalingrad. But neither author devoted much space to Operation Bagration in June-July 1944. As for contemporaries, it was overshadowed in their volumes by Normandy and by what Falls called the ‘tragedy’ of the Warsaw Rising. ¹⁰

As Fuller observed, there were already excellent accounts of campaigns and battles in the West from war correspondents, and these laid the basis for more detailed postwar histories like his own. By contrast, independent journalists had been kept away from the Eastern Front and official Soviet communiqués, to quote Fuller, seemed ‘to have been written for people with the intelligence of a child of ten.’ Much of his material was therefore quarried from the two volumes by Allen and Muratoff. ¹¹

But lack of evidence was not the only reason for Western neglect of the Eastern Front. Cold War bias played a part, as I think is apparent in Churchill’s war memoirs. In Churchill’s early drafts of volume four, Stalingrad was mentioned only in passing, whereas a full chapter was devoted to Alamein, preceded by several more about the desert war by way of build-up. One of Churchill’s publishers, Emery Reves, reminded him that, for European and American readers, Stalingrad and Midway were seen as turning points of equal importance to Alamein. Churchill heeded the criticism, but in a revealingly unbalanced way – producing a fifteen-page chapter on the American naval victories at Coral Sea and Midway, whereas Stalingrad got only four pages of text, plus two half-page maps. Moreover, this material is spread over two chapters, one hundred pages apart, further weakening its impact. ¹²

Material on Midway was readily available from of Samuel Eliot Morison’s semi-official history of the US Navy at war: Churchill’s naval researcher relied on this so heavily that Morison threatened to sue for plagiarism. In similar vein, Churchill’s military assistant, General Sir Henry Pownall, could have emulated Fuller by gutting Muratoff and Allen’s volumes on The Russian Campaigns. The root problem was not sources but attitude. Churchill was rewriting volume four in August 1950, at a critical moment in the Korean War. America was Britain’s ally and his memoirs sought to affirm and celebrate the ‘special relationship’; by contrast, the Soviet Union had now become Britain’s great foe. Churchill did not deny the Red Army’s contribution to victory over Hitler – his few amendments to Pownall’s draft include allusion to Stalingrad as ‘this crushing disaster to the German arms’ – but he clearly did not wish to feature it. Another of his additions – that Communism and Nazism were ‘equally odious’ forms of ‘totalitarian tyranny’ – hints at his Cold War mindset. ¹³

By the late 1940s, new and valuable sources about the Eastern Front were becoming available, through the reminiscences of German commanders who had fought in these campaigns, and Liddell Hart helped make these available to British and American readers. In late 1947 he published two big newspaper articles which together surveyed the whole history of the Eastern Front. The first showed how ‘desperately narrow’ had been the Soviet margin of survival in 1941 while the second featured German feelers after Stalingrad for a compromise peace. ¹⁴ Liddell Hart’s 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill, entitled in the United States less cryptically as The German Generals Talk, had several chapters on the Eastern Front. Coverage was much fuller on the period before Stalingrad than after – Kursk, for instance, was hardly mentioned – and Liddell Hart gave little sense of the scale of the conflict, but his book did convey the Wehrmacht’s respect for the Red Army. General Ewald von Kleist summed up the general verdict: the Russians were ‘first-rate fighters from the start’ and they became ‘first-rate soldiers with experience’. ¹⁵

The Other Side of the Hill later became notorious because of Liddell Hart’s credulous view of the German officer corps as ‘essentially technicians, intent on their professional job, and with little idea of things outside it. It is easy to see how Hitler hoodwinked and handled them . . .’ Today, following the work of Omer Bartov and others, it would be more accurate to say that the generals hoodwinked Liddell Hart about their complicity in Nazi atrocities. ¹⁶ But this should not obscure his contribution in opening up German sources about the war for an English-language audience.

Liddell Hart’s book was built around interviews with captured generals such as Rundstedt, Manstein and Manteuffel. But the Western Allies had also seized hundreds of tons of German military documents, and the records of the Army Command (the OKH) plus Army Group war diaries provided rich, if patchy, insights into Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. After V-E Day and the Nuremburg trials, the US Army’s Historical Division put the captured generals to work on the captured documents. its Foreign Military Studies project generated some 2,400 manuscripts between 1948 and 1961, many of them detailed analyses of the strategy, tactics and key battles of the Eastern Front. ¹⁷ In overall charge was General Franz Halder, Hitler’s Chief of the Army General Staff in 1938-42. Although imprisoned by the Americans for two years after the war, Halder escaped the noose at Nuremburg because of his involvement in plots against Hitler. After his release he oversaw the Foreign Military Studies programme and, when it was wound up in 1961, President John F. Kennedy awarded Halder the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, one of America’s highest non-military decorations.

This might seem richly ironic, given Halder’s role in implementing Hitler’s wars of aggression in 1939-41. But that is to miss the importance of the in-house histories he had supervised during his postwar career. Initially they were commissioned to help the U.S. Army evaluate its own wartime operations but the focus shifted substantially as the Cold War deepened in the late 1940s. The main aim of the project then became understanding the strategy and tactics of the Red Army and assessing the methods used by the Germans to counter them – in other words using the history of the last war to suggest how to wage the next one. Given the value of these Foreign Military Studies, very few were disseminated outside the higher echelons of the U.S. Army. In essence, the Cold War made the history of the Eastern Front too sensitive for the West to print. ¹⁸

There is a larger point here. Today we are familiar with the way both the Soviets and the Western Allies used captured German scientists who worked on Hitler’s V-2 rockets to help develop Cold War missile programmes. Hence the American joke, after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957: ‘our Germans are behind their Germans.’ ¹⁹ Thanks to the US space programme, Werner von Braun, one of the architects of the V-2, became a household name in the United States. But missiles were only part of the picture. Paul Maddrell has demonstrated how both the United States and the Soviet Union exploited the whole range of German scientific talent after 1945. ²⁰ And the story of the captured generals and the captured archives shows that the Cold War drew on Germany’s intellectual capital in the field of history as well as science.

The way the Western Allies used German sources to explore the Eastern Front underlines the fundamental point: useful Soviet evidence was in very short supply. Of course, most of the official documents about the Western Front were also closed, and scheduled to remain so until the twenty-first century. (It was not until 1958 that the British Government enacted a Fifty-Year Rule, making it possible in the early 1960s to contemplate serious historical research on the origins of World War One.) But World War Two in the West was already known in considerable detail through wartime newspaper reportage. The memoirs of the leading generals, such as Dwight Eisenhower and ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, opened it up further. ²¹ The Soviet position was very different: war reporting, as Fuller said, was almost useless and Soviet generals definitely did not talk. In short, Stalin was more to blame than the West for the Iron Curtain that came down over Russia’s War.

On 24 June 1945 Red Square was the scene of a spectacular Victory Parade. Stalin, as Supreme Commander, had planned to lead it on a white stallion but, after being thrown by the horse in training, he entrusted the honour to his deputy, Marshal Georgii Zhukov. Red Army units paraded through the Square, watched by their leader from the safety of the Lenin Mausoleum; then two hundred veterans marched forward and each tossed the captured banner of a Nazi unit at his feet. ²²

Victory was sweet, but Stalin feared the taste would soon turn very sour. Conscious of how Russia’s past wars had destabilized the Tsarist regime, from the Decembrists of 1825 to the February Revolution of 1917, he was determined to put the lid firmly back on Soviet society after the ferment of war. Over-mighty generals were one target: Zhukov – the hero of Leningrad, Moscow and Berlin – was packed off to obscure commands in Odessa and then the Urals; Alexander Novikov, commander of the Red Air Force, was tortured and imprisoned. Stalin also stated that ‘it was too early to be writing memoirs so soon after these great events, at a time when passions were too much aroused’, thereby not only blocking the publication of accounts of the war but also deterring would-be memoirists from even picking up their pens. In 1947 Victory Day was downgraded from a state holiday to a working holiday and official commemorations of the event ceased. Although aware of internal reports for the Politburo estimating the Soviet war dead at over 15 million, Stalin settled for 7.5 million as a figure that sounded suitably heroic but not criminally homicidal. ²³

The basic rationale for historical repression was clear: Stalin himself alluded to it with unusual candour at a Kremlin banquet on 24 May 1945. ‘Our government has made many mistakes. We had some desperate moments in 1941- 42 when our army was in retreat . . . Some other nation might well have said to its rulers: You have not fulfilled our expectations, go away, we shall set up another government’. ²⁴ The language of collectivity, of course, served to mask individual responsibility: Stalin was personally to blame for most of those mistakes – the failure to resist the German onslaught in June 1941, the premature counter-attacks of January and May 1942, and so on. Little wonder he wished to prevent historical discussion and move the country on. Postwar Stalinist society was based on what Vera Dunham has called ‘The Big Deal’ – the new managerial middle class got education, jobs and basic consumer comforts in return for political passivity and silence about the past. ²⁵

The silence was broken to some extent after Stalin’s death in 1953. In the Khrushchev era, senior military men published their memoirs. A series of official monographs also appeared, culminating in the six-volume History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (1960-3). Although factually accurate about the details of operations and the units involved, these works glossed over Soviet setbacks, rarely indicated casualties and were vague about the making of decisions and their consequences. ²⁶ Even this partial thaw ended with Khrushchev’s forced resignation in 1964, and the ensuing Brezhnev era turned the Great Patriotic War into a national cult. Victory Day was reinstated as a national holiday and official museums sprang up across the country to celebrate the heroes and the heroism of 1941-5 – their work animated by the deeper Cold War aim of demonstrating the continual need for military preparedness. Despite greater frankness now about the death toll, officially consecrated at 20 million, memoirs were again banned and critical history suppressed. Alexander Nekrich’s study of 22 June 1941, published in 1965, was damned as a ‘deliberate distortion of the policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government’; the author was expelled from the party and eventually from the country. ²⁷

On the other hand, research and writing continued behind the scenes in the military history institutes, resulting in a mass of detailed studies as well as a number of additional official histories, and some of this became available in the West, notably through the work of John Erickson. A fluent Russianist who had already published a book on the Soviet High Command before 1941, Erickson went to Moscow for the first time in 1963, as researcher for the American author Cornelius Ryan’s book about the battle for Berlin. Impressed with his knowledge of and sympathy for Russia’s war, the Soviet military history establishment opened up to him, and their internal histories formed the basis of his two classic volumes on The Road to Stalingrad (1975) and The Road to Berlin (1983). Although detailed, often dense, operational narratives, Erickson’s works were an impressive synthesis of Soviet and German materials, and they served as the basic Western account until after the demise of the Soviet Union. ²⁸

It was the Gorbachev era of glasnost and then the Soviet collapse that made possible the flood of Western writing in the 1990s to which I referred at the beginning – the works of Antony Beevor, Richard Overy, and others. In other words, it took half a century to remedy the deficiency that Liddell Hart had identified back in 1947. And although Cold War hostility on the Western side played its part, as historian David Glantz observed in 1995: ‘Perhaps the greatest factor contributing to our unbalanced view of the war is the collective failure of Soviet historiography to present Western ( and Soviet) readers with a credible account.’ ²⁹

There are many other ways in which the Cold War froze our understanding of World War Two. Historical debates about the policy of Unconditional Surrender and about Britain’s so-called ‘Mediterranean strategy’ are examples; likewise the enduring distortions about the Yalta conference. But there is no space for fuller discussion here. Instead, let me conclude with some more general observations about the place of contemporary history in the larger fabric of public memory.

The theme of war and memory lies at the centre of recent historiography. How conflicts have been commemorated in monuments and cemeteries, how individual soldiers and whole societies have recalled past wars – this has been an immensely fertile area for historical study, cultivated by distinguished scholars such as Pierre Nora, Paul Fussell and Jay Winter. ³⁰ Most of this work has concentrated on literature, notably novels and poems, or more recently on the material and visual aspects of memory – places, images and films. Indeed the American scholar Emily Rosenberg has argued that ‘in recent American culture, historical memory . . . is inseparable from the modern media, in all their forms’ and that the distinction between ‘memory’ and professional ‘history’ has ‘little significance’ when studying the place of World War Two in the late-twentieth-century American culture. ³¹

In consequence, the influence of memoirs and history books has been neglected, particularly those published during or soon after a war. To me this seems mistaken, as I tried to show in my recent study of the writing and impact of Churchill’s The Second World War. ³²

In the first place, memoirs and instant histories often establish the conceptual framework for public and popular memory. The titles of Churchill’s volumes – such as The Gathering Storm, Their Finest Hour, or Closing the Ring – still provide the phases and the phrases by which the Second World War is remembered. Second, and related, these works also often set the narrative framework. For instance, Churchill highlighted the victory at Alamein in November 1942 and ascribed it to Monty’s superior generalship compared with that of his predecessors. This created the master narrative for the whole history of Britain’s desert war.

The same pattern may be seen in Western writing about the Eastern Front. The war journalism of Alexander Werth and others had the effect of fragmenting the conflict into a few separate epic battles – Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and then Berlin – disconnected from larger campaigns. Even today, these battles form the conceptual framework for Russia’s war, at least in the popular imagination.

It is also striking that knowledge of and writing about Russia’s war still features the first year and a half, in other words between the opening of Barbarossa and the victory at Stalingrad. This was what grabbed British and American attention at the time, before their own war caught fire and overshadowed Russia’s – including the battle of Kursk in July 1943 and the momentous Soviet offensives of the summer of 1944. The Bagration campaign got virtually no attention in the Western media in June 2004, amid the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of D-Day, even though – at the very least – it could be said to have contributed significantly to the Allies’ eventual breakout from Normandy.

In both these ways, conceptual and chronological, the initial versions of the war helped create a durable template within which other ‘carriers’ of collective memory, including film-makers, have operated. The same, I suggest, is often true of the historiography of other wars.

There is also a larger lesson here for those of us who teach history, particularly in universities. Course booklists tend to feature the latest works of scholarship, which students are encouraged to examine and critique. Yet in the writing of history, as in daily life, first impressions are often very hard to shake off, as the still frosty history of the Eastern Front serves to remind us.