PREFACE
IF A GENERAL SURVEY of the First and Second World Wars has any merit at all, it must be in the attempt to provide a new set of broad outlines for the subject. This is the perennial business of history — to reassess the past in the light of what has come after, to reconcile what we knew then with what we know now. There may be nothing of profit in the exercise, for Bismarck’s contention that we can learn from the experience of others is at the best a dubious one. But we have nothing else.
As we look back, a generation after the close of the Second World War, many things seem different. Some of the old simplicities that were accepted as axiomatic by contemporaries have either faded away, as old soldiers are reputed to do, or have come to present a much more complicated appearance. Victory crumbled in our hands even as we seized it, and the second half of the twentieth century gives indications of being not only very different from the first half, but even more ominous.
Truth, it is said, is always the first casualty in war. But although this may be excused on the plea of military necessity, there is surely no justification for prolonging the habit of falsehood into the years of peace. Any hope we may have of learning from our own or others’ experience is certainly betrayed if the experience itself is falsified.
Of course, historical truth is relative, for history is an inexact discipline, but this need not prevent us from forming sound general judgments about the past. This book makes five such general judgments, which run like themes throughout the narrative.
The first is that, viewed from a distance, the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century can be seen to have been really one war, possessing an organic unity, and this unity has to be perceived before its component parts can properly be understood. In both wars Britain, France, Russia, and the United States fought Germany and various allies of Germany. ...