Theatre of War (Moments in History)

In the waterlogged killing fields around Passchendaele, the mud was as lethal as the guns. Edwin Campion Vaughan describes the ordeal of a single day.
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Tooze—whose book The Wages of Destruction, an economic history of the Third Reich, is a groundbreaking piece of scholarship—is adamant that the turning point occurred less than a year after the war began.

Theatre of war: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the s | Stage | The Guardian

Tooze was the only historian I talked to who pointed to May as the moment everything changed, and he makes a powerful case. The mistake most people make, he suggests, is in thinking that the German victory over the British and French in spring was somehow predestined. In fact, in terms of numbers and quantity of motorized vehicles, the Allies held a distinct advantage. No, Tooze argues, the Germans won this battle because of superior leadership and, crucially, because they were lucky.

10 Key Dates in World War Two

If the Allies had been able to isolate or significantly hold up the German advance, then not only would the Nazis have lost the battle for France, they would have lost the whole war. In essence, what a detailed study of this history has taught him is that if the British and French had not performed so appallingly in this one fight, then World War II would have ended by the summer of in an ignominious defeat for the Germans. This was all the more extraordinary given that just months before, he had been considered an incompetent military strategist for even suggesting the invasion of France.

In the autumn of , senior military figures like Franz Halder, the chief of staff of the German army, had thought that Hitler was almost insane for directing the Germans to mount an attack west. The First World War cast a long and dark shadow over any second world war, as far as the German leadership was concerned.

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And the German High Command feared above all else a repeat of the bloody stalemate of the trench war in France between and But instead of repeating that inconclusive and costly struggle, Hitler led the Germans to total victory in six weeks. At the time, it seemed to be the greatest military triumph in history.

It also meant, of course, that when Hitler subsequently called for the invasion of the Soviet Union, his generals were relatively relaxed. After all, what problems could the shambolic, ill-led Red Army pose to an army that had so swiftly conquered France?

Theatre of war: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s

N one of the other historians I talked to picked such an early event of the war as the decisive one. Crane, for example, the director of the U. Army Military History Institute and a former professor of history at West Point, chose as his turning point precisely the moment this contest became a true world war.


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Another distinguished American military historian, Professor Geoffrey Wawro of the University of North Texas, agreed with Crane—at least in the context of the Pacific war. But they were the only historians I talked to who believed that Pearl Harbor was the key moment of the conflict. Others, like the presidential historian Robert Dallek, thought Pearl Harbor—while obviously important—could not be considered the turning point because America was already set on a path to war.

In fact, Dallek was one of no fewer than six historians who voted for a turning point that took place on the Volga River in the south of Russia, at a city that bore the name of the Soviet leader—Stalingrad. While I have seen no hard evidence that he discussed plays with members of the Royal family, we can be pretty sure that he knew what they would want. He was, after all, their servant, and his other duties included accompanying the monarch on state visits and organising garden parties at Buckingham Palace, as well as supervising the annual upping of the royal swans. Criticising a friendly power — as Germany was — or its leader, would have been unacceptable.

In August , a play was submitted by a Jewish doctor from Leeds; it was set in a country called Nordia, which was ruled by a dictator named Hacker and his antisemitic Yellow Shirts. But ban it is just what the head of the royal household did: In February Lord Cromer rejected another anti-Nazi play, even though the producer offered to make any cuts and changes he might require.

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It was not that Cromer doubted the accuracy of the play — far from it: Some criticisms of Germany did make it on to the stage, where they could be sufficiently masked and not too explicit. But what actually saved this play, so far as Lord Cromer was concerned, was that it could be read more as anti-war than anti-Hitler, with the democratic nation as guilty of war-mongering and nationalistic propaganda as the dictator-led regime. The press was free of such restrictions, so writers and cartoonists could say what they liked — or at least what their editors and proprietors would allow.


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    4. But the way in which the British monarchy used the Lord Chamberlain to protect Nazi Germany from attack or criticism on stage should at least be taken into account when assessing their relationship. A brilliant satirical farce co-written by a young Terence Rattigan was repeatedly refused a licence until after war had been declared — by which time its moment had passed. He is the author of The Censorship of British Drama to Order by newest oldest recommendations.