The World at War, 1914-1945. Jeremy Black. London, UK: Rowan and Littlefield, 2019.
Writing history is an art. It involves a great deal of subjective judgment and interpretation. The author qua artist is accountable not only for their choice of subject, but also for its treatment. Perspective, to take but one example, is essential. Foreshortening is a technique that allows the viewer to perceive dimensionality but does so at the expense of detail. Chiaroscuro involves the use of variations in light and dark to indicate depth. Both create effects that help compose the work and establish context; however, they do so through manipulation and omission. The resultant picture—portrait or landscape—must be judged on its overall effect, considering not only what it includes, but equally what it excludes. Jeremy Black’s The World at War could have been a superb rendering of an important topic, but it suffers from too much foreshortening and omission to be of much value to a contemporary reader seeking a deeper understanding of the World Wars.
Over a century has passed since the end of World War One; World War Two ended seventy-five years ago. Each has been studied separately and in great depth. Amazon has over 10,000 books for sale on the 1914-1918 war alone, ranging across concise histories, complete histories, and alternate histories. Many of this number and some of the very best came in the run-up to the November 11th, 2018 armistice centennial.[1] It is natural, then, to ask why read—or indeed, write—yet another such history.
Black, the prodigious author of a wide range of excellent military history texts, has an ambitious aim in publishing The World at War: 1914-1945: to identify the reasons for the Allied victories. But the more innovative goal is to present both conflicts—and the interwar period between them—as an integrated whole. In his own words:
Two world wars, being so close together, invite discussion in one book. Their history, important in itself, has also been of great consequence in world history. Focusing on the military history of these wars, this book discusses what happened and explains Allied victory in the two conflicts.[2]
Choosing to tackle both world wars together in a single volume could make sense. However, to do so, the author has to make a distinct effort to highlight the commonalities and differences between the conflicts. A historian who combined the Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War into one book would need to justify their choice. While technology or tactics might be a point of similarity, the causes and impacts of both wars would be quite different.
Black’s decision to examine both world wars in a single book has merit. While a few other books with a similar scope exist, Black is not the first to suggest that a combined examination is worthwhile. One such author is Enzo Traverso. His Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945, for example, makes the two wars of a piece: they are episodes of a struggle between liberalism and totalitarianism, fascism and communism, and envelop the Spanish Civil War and the running sore of Weimar Germany. His thesis is provocative and focuses on ideology, but the volume hangs together nicely. Traverso takes care to put the events of 1914 to 1945 into a plausible framework. Phillip Bobbitt, in his The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, places both world wars into an even grander frame; he situates them as part of The Long War that stretches from 1914 all the way to 1990.
These contrast starkly with World at War, where Black fails to provide explicit context. His introduction is a mere two pages long, beginning and ending abruptly. As a result, the reader is slightly mystified by the book: what is it actually all about? While it purports to be about the world at war over a 30-year period, it focuses mainly on military history. It does include two chapters on the causes of these wars, but they rely mostly on secondary literature and are, on the whole, unconvincing. Moreover, while the book covers both wars, his treatment proceeds in a linear, chronological fashion. Each of its three parts—World War One, The Interwar Period, and World War Two—are virtually identical in structure, the first and last opening with chapters on causes, and all then proceeding to look at land, sea, and air warfare. It is only in his concluding chapter—itself a mere eleven pages long—that longitudinal, thematic comparisons are made.
Despite being mainly a military history, Black’s book does examine the causes of both wars. However, these chapters are not well structured. They proceed chronologically but provide little by way of an overarching framework. The other chapters, likewise, proceed in time order, with little cross-referencing made across the three periods. For instance, Black could have developed a framework where concepts such as technology, command, or leadership were compared across the wars, helping to advance his point that they should be looked at as a continuous whole. This lack of explicit parallelism makes the discernment of thematic connections across the three parts difficult.
Books that view the period 1914-1945 as one of continuity can suffer from a narrow, Eurocentric view. As Gilbert Murray would write about the founding of the United Nations in 1945, “Europe is not everything. There are other continents.”[3] Black acknowledges this. In his conclusion, for instance, he states that “[t]he idea of the long war appears highly Eurocentric.”[4] In the rest of the book, though, Black does little to counter this all-too-common fault. For instance, he claims the First World War is about more than the usual tales of static trench warfare; he points out that manoeuvre was an important aspect of the fighting outside of the Western Front. However, he then proceeds to focus almost exclusively on the Western Front, sparing less than a page each for discussions of other theatres. India, having contributed over three and a half million troops across both wars, rates only nineteen mentions in the book, and not a single entry in the index. The book's sources tend to be from secondary literature, albeit ignoring the best produced between 2014 and 2018. Moreover, the sources are predominantly Western—mostly British and American—leaving little scope for a fulsome account of the conflicts' global nature.
The period under review is not treated holistically. World at War is a hodgepodge of elements hastily assembled. The preface, introduction, and conclusion are abrupt in the extreme, which gives the reader little entrée into a complicated subject. It appears the book is made up of leftover lecture notes assembled scrapbook style to serve as a coherent manuscript. The result is a text that assumes too much to be of use to the novice and provides very little for the more expert reader. For instance, in the chapter on the causes of the First World War, Black asserts that “[b]elief in war, as an expression of a martial spirit and an ideology of masculinity, was greatly sustained by popular literature in Europe, the United States, and Japan.”[5] He provides little evidence to bolster this claim. Indeed, the entire chapter trots through a familiar recitation of Romanticism, nationalism, Darwinism, and the international system's nature as explanations for the war.[6] Black fails to offer illustrative evidence, let alone evidence for any of these.
As the U.S. enters what may well be later regarded as the Second Interwar Period, where discussion of a return to Great Power Competition has intensified, good histories need to make sense of why such wars come about and how they are fought. Furthermore, as the world wars of the Twentieth Century recede, it may make sense to treat them as episodes of a more massive conflagration, much as we tend to see The Thirty Years’ War as a whole, rather than a start-stop-start string of individual battles. Readers looking for such an offering should look elsewhere, for World at War fails to deliver.
Christopher Ankersen is Clinical Associate Professor and leads the Global Risk specialization at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. The author of several books, his most recent is a work he co-edited titled The Future of Global Affairs: Managing Discontinuity, Disruption and Destruction.
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Notes:
[1] See, for instance, Peter Hart, The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, UK: Allen Lane, 2012); Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (New York: Random House, 2013); and Gordon Martel, The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 and WWI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[2] Jeremy Black, The World at War, 1914-1945 (London, UK: Rowan and Littlefield, 2019), vii.
[3] Mark Mazower, “The End of Eurocentrism,” Critical Inquiry 40, Number 4 (Summer 2014): 298, https://doi.org/10.1086/676409.
[4] Black, World at War, 314.
[5] Black, World at War, 8.
[6] Black, World at War, 7-28.