In History Today, Roger Moorhouse talks to Antony Beevor on his latest booK:
I asked what novelties of approach or new material he employed for the book? Did he, for instance, set out to try to draw the two traditionally distinct narratives of the war in the Pacific and the war in Europe into a single integral whole? Though he does make a nod in that direction, Beevor believes that such an approach is not really feasible, adding that the war in the Pacific was ‘almost like a war on another planet’, such was its separation from events in Europe. ‘I was fascinated,’ he went on, ‘by the reaction of the US Marines on Okinawa when they heard about the surrender of Germany. It was “Who cares?” For them it was impossible to imagine, just as it was impossible for the people fighting in the snows of Russia to imagine war in the Pacific Islands.’
If the approach is largely conventional, the book does not lack new information. Russian sources are still yielding fascinating material, he notes, despite political retrenchment, while German scholarship is throwing up new approaches and new resources, such as the archive of Feldpostbriefe (soldiers ‘field post’ letters) in Stuttgart. Beevor’s most interesting revelation, however, is the horrific contention that the Japanese army practised organised cannibalism. As he explains: ‘Allied prisoners, especially Indian army prisoners, were kept as sort of human cattle and slaughtered one by one for their meat.’ News of such crimes was largely suppressed after the war, as it was considered ‘too awful even to be mentioned in the war crimes trials’, but has since been brought to light by Japanese historians.
[. . .]
Of course the heart of Beevor’s appeal is precisely that straightforward narrative approach, coupled with his lively, engaging style and his use of memorable, almost cinematic, set-pieces. I put it to him that, in tackling a book of this scope, perhaps he had been obliged to rein in some of those literary flourishes. ‘You are right,’ he conceded. ‘There is so much more to tell and there is much less room for the vignette, but it is still terribly important, serving to root the reader in the reality of the moment.’ He is swift to acknowledge a debt to John Keegan in this regard, under whom he studied at Sandhurst and whose The Face of Battle (1976) was hugely influential. ‘It is absolutely vital to give the reader a frequent reminder of what it was actually like, the view from below, otherwise it’s just history from above, which never really works.’
