As seen on TV (The World at War: The Landmark Oral History from the Previously Unpublished Archives - Richard Holmes)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	The World at War: The Landmark Oral History from the Previously Unpublished Archives - Richard Holmes
Date:	14/05/08 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting interviews

Disadvantages: Some strange omissions

The World At War was a groundbreaking documentary series about World War Two, first shown on ITV in 1973/4. Along with plenty of archive footage and music and classy narration from Laurence Olivier, it also offered extensive talking-head interviews with people who'd been involved in the war at all levels, from government ministers to humble infantrymen. This book for the first time puts most of the interviews into print, offering itself as a 'landmark oral history' of the war.

It's edited by Richard Holmes, apparently a popular TV historian, although I've never heard of him. He breaks it up into chapters similar to the episodes of the series (although not quite the same, as some episodes featured very little interview footage). He provides a page-long introduction to each chapter to give a bit of background, and occasional footnotes. In spite of this, though, you'll need a reasonable knowledge of the war to really appreciate a lot of this. On TV the narration or a series of clips would provide much-needed context for the interviews, but here there's none of that.

Still, it provides a decent enough oral history of the war (and earlier), starting with life in Hitler's Germany and ending with the start of the Cold War. Some of it is interesting, some disturbing, and some quite funny. The interviews haven't been edited particularly, so they mirror speech patterns more than regular prose does. Some of the German or Japanese interviewees have quite garbled syntax, as their spoken English isn't perfect (much better than my German or Japanese, mind you).

Perhaps the most notable negative is that on the whole it's a quite elitist collection of interviews. There's rather more of the generals and governments than of the regular people who were on the front line, or being bombed, or imprisoned. The TV show had more focus on the ordinary people in its archive footage, but in print it feels unreasonably skewed in favour of the VIPs. The chapters on various conferences of the Allied powers (Casablanca, Yalta etc) are interminable.

It's also rather dominated by the British and Americans, perhaps inevitably. The lack of Russian contributors isn't surprising given that the interviews were conducted in the early 70s, but although there are plenty of German contributors, the chapter on D-Day doesn't have anything from the Germans at all. This is mystifying (presumably it reflects the source material rather than being a decision taken by the book's editor).

It's also the case that, as with the TV series, there are some surprising omissions. The extensive Allied code breaking was still secret when the interviews were conducted, but there's also no real mention of the particulars of the invasion of Poland, the French Resistance, partisan warfare in Yugoslavia and Russia, or what was going on in China. The Holocaust gets one rather short chapter, which is strange nowadays, when it's seen as the most important thing that happened in the war. I guess that in the early 70s, when there were a lot more people around who'd fought in the war, the Holocaust - which took place in Poland and the Soviet Union for the most part, countries largely inaccessible to Westerners - just didn't have the kind of resonance it has now.

Perhaps a little more editorial interference would have been wise. The presence of a short piece by Vera Lynn at the end of the chapter about Burma is slightly puzzling without the context of the TV version (that episode made extensive use of one of her songs). Albert Speer makes his usual claims about not knowing the Holocaust happened, something which has never seemed credible, and it would have been good to see the editor tell us of the evidence to the contrary. For the most part the introductions and so forth are good, occasionally explaining a controversy, but letting the interviewees speak for themselves; a bit more context would have been nice, though.

It's not that this book doesn't have a lot of interesting stuff in it, it does. But it doesn't feel complete without the extra bits the TV version gave us. Apparently a complex legal struggle over ownership of the interviews has prevented them from being published until now, but the timing makes it feel like a bit of a cash in. With recent years seeing hefty and successful World War 2 books from the likes of Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, it feels like this is riding on a wave of current interest in the subject. Not that there's any reason this shouldn't be popular, but it feels oddly insubstantial given its size and its branding.

Only in hardback at the moment, it'll set you back at least £10 on amazon. 672 pages with quite a few photos. Worth reading if you're a World War 2 buff, but possibly not if you're a general reader.

Summary: The book of the famous documentary series