Llyrdech chi, ddweud i gydech chi. My name is David Edgerton. It is my very great pleasure to welcome you all to this lecture to mark the inauguration of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, and we're delighted that Sir Michael is here with us this evening. In the 1960s, Michael Howard had a vision for a new kind of history of war, which would study war in all its complexity and seek also to examine how war affected history more generally. He founded the Department of War studies here at King's and later went on to become the regist professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. After that Robert A lavet professor of military and naval history at Yale. The study of the history of war has flourished at King's in the years since his departure, vindicating his great ambitions for the subject. Pen cydydd i'ch cymorth yn llwyddoedd o làr drwy'r ysgrifennu cysylltion yna'r un��wyddiad yw i'r drefnid oedd sut yn oedd amser ond o'r bethau, edrych, roedd o'r boddence, a'r dyfanciedol, a'r bydau, oherwydd o un lŵg, o'r drefnid o'r ysgrifennu cysylltion. Fy warwch yn crossfocoa sy'n cynogi ac yn dwyfodol i'r ysgrifennu cyhoedd ac yn dweud i'r wath cyfynodol, the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War has been established jointly under the Department of War studies and the Department of History. Our aim is to promote the scholarly history of war in all its dimensions, to train research students, to host research projects and conferences, and we also already run a flourishing masters in the history of war. Our aim is to promote the study of the history of war from the ancient world to the present, ac we covered the history, not just of all the armed services but also of all those involved in war or who suffered from it indeed. We aim to study the history of war from many historiographical vantage points from economic history to cultural history from international history to the history of science and technology. We aimed to encourage the study of the history of war as a central feature of human history and to study it from using the work of historians many traditions and from many fields and we do this in recognition of some Michael Howard's great contribution to the multifaceted history of war. That's my great pleasure to hand over to Joe Maola, Professor Joe Maola of the Department of War Studies who will introduce our speaker. Thank you David. Well first of all it falls to me to thank Richard O'Brief for accepting our invitation to speak tonight. Thank you Richard. To give you a brief introduction to his career, Richard was educated at Cambridge University and taught at Cambridge as a fellow of Queen's College from 1972 to 79. In 1980, and this is his connection both with Sir Michael Howard and King's, he moved to King's College, the Department of History in 1980 and taught there until 2004. At which time he moved to Exeter and took up a professorship in modern history at Exeter. He's a fellow of King's College, a fellow of the British Academy, the author of 26 books covering the Nazi economy, the Second World War, the Air Warfare, a vast impressive range of history and for his contribution to the history of war he was awarded by the Society for Military History, the Samuel Elliott Morrison Prize in 2001. I'd also like to note that in 2004 he won the Wolfson Prize for history, for his book The Dictators, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. In 2013 he published his latest book on air warfare, The Bombing War Europe 1939-1945 and he's just published two new books, A History of War and 100 Battles and in a few weeks his new book, The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II will appear in print. So again thank you Richard for accepting our invitation to lecture and lecterns yours. Well thank you very much for those kind words of introduction.  It seems quite strange coming back here and not being responsible for any teaching. It's a pleasure to be from former colleagues too in the audience. I'd also like to say of course what an honour it is for me to be asked to give this opening lecture for the new Michael Howard Centre. I have to say that I arrived at King's in 1980, quite a long time after Michael had left but he won't mind me saying that his presence lingered on in the department and it was all enormously grateful to Michael I was particularly because it did make the history of war suddenly academically and historically respectable which it wasn't I think in many areas beforehand and I certainly won't be the only person in this room who has tried over the course of his career to emulate the kind of things that Michael did in his. I want to start off first of all by saying that my reasons for choosing this title when I was given the freedom to choose my title is largely a selfish one because I am writing a history of the Second World War. It's in its early stages and so daunted have I been by the prospect of condensing the Second World War down into one volume but I thought I would take the opportunity to speculate a little bit about the problems of approaching the history of the Second World War so I hope that you will indulge my selfishness in the course of the next hour. I want to start off just by reminding ourselves of what an extraordinary war we are talking about if we look at it in aggregate terms it was a war waged on an enormous scale more than 100 million people mostly men but some women in uniform worldwide 55 to 60 million dead still I think our best estimate of a number of dead as a result of the Second World War but tens of millions more of course damaged physically and psychologically by the experience and aspects of the war I have to say which I think we underplay a great deal casualties are not just those who end up dead on the battlefield there are many other kinds of casualties that one can encounter in the Second World War even more extraordinary most of the competent powers except the United States devoted around about two thirds of their GNP to the waging of war that's an extraordinary figure you think of the fuss people make now about 1% of GNP here and there to think of countries willing for five or six years to devote up to two thirds of their GNP to the waging of war and then we need to remember of course the civilian cost the tens of millions dispossessed, deported, whose wealth and income was squandered people who starved to death or died of mass epidemics those who died under the bombing and those of course who were the victims of violent racism what an extraordinary conflict it was so how do we approach it if our job is to write a history of the Second World War well I would say that the recent tendency in much of the historiography has been to what I call simplification or reductive narratives of the war you can get reductive narratives of a number of different kinds one of course is the war and everything associated but it in the end derives from Hitler Hitler is our central reference point if you want to understand why war happened and the course of the war well whatever one thinks about the role of great individuals in history this is clearly an adequate explanation not only because it's intensely Eurocentric and then there are histories of the war simply as military conflict the growing tendency really to treat us rather like the Premier League rating states for their capacity to wage war effectively producing the tables of performance which alter over time as people find good things to say about the Italians or good things to say about the British army and then there is war as a simple ideological battlefield this is perhaps the most persistent persistent reductive narrative that this is in fact the war of good versus evil complicated in a way of course because you have to sidestep the fact that Britain and the United States were fighting the Soviet Union and since 1990 of course we now have no illusions about the nature of the Soviet system during the wartime period now all of these are what we might regard as tidy answers and I won't embarrass I hope Michael too much by reminding him that he once wrote but almost all historians are tidy minded well maybe we are but the problem about the second world war I think is the extraordinary complexity of this conflict and it does I think raise some potentially baffling issues for anybody who wants to write about it because it is really the history of everything over a period of six years a history which is absolutely packed with extraordinary drama I want to highlight first of all three of the issues that strike me as important about writing the history of the war the first is the issue of timing now some recent history of the second world war have begun on September 1, 1939 with no introduction or explanation and end of course on August 15, 1945 now this is clearly not satisfactory indeed the chronology has become increasingly moved forward and backwards for the second world war to be able to make sense of everything that happened during the course of the conflict reluctant though some historians are I think to accept the idea of the 30 years war it is difficult to get away from the idea that we are looking at a rather discreet period of European history and Asian history 30 years which is punctuated by periods of intense violence and I think anybody writing the history of the second world war has got to accept the extent to which it is rooted in the experience of the first world war not least because many of the leaders and commanders of course from the second world war had fought in the first world war not just Hitler, Mussolini, but most of the leading commanders as well had experienced the first world war and what I'd experienced with them to the 1930s and the 1940s it's also important to push it forward beyond 1945 because although 1945 seemed at the time a kind of curtain that you drew down with all the horrible things behind it looking forward to a bright new global future you can't draw that curtain down a great deal of violence went on after 1945 and I'll come back to some of that in a moment a great deal of violence went on after 1945 great many unresolved issues in the war were only resolved again with violence over the course of the decade that follows in other words a strict chronology of 1939-1945 I would argue doesn't work anymore and in some sense it's quite misleading if we focus simply on that six year period then there's the issue of space or area if you like now the war did touch the entire globe as you all know it touched it in all three dimensions too land, sea and air I was often puzzled when as a child I listened to my mother's stories about my family in the war my mother was based in Sri Lanka my uncle had a commission in Antigua in the Caribbean my other uncle was serving in the pay corps in Egypt and I remember being puzzled about a war that Britain was fighting against Germany in so many different parts of the globe but it was global people did find themselves fighting in tiny corners of the war of the globe whether in Madagascar or the Aleutian Islands or wherever even neutrals of course were touched by the experience of war often rather dramatically for example the Spanish Legion that went off to fight on the eastern front or in more surreptitious ways with bankers that were able to take gold melted down from murdered Jews and to put it into their vaults but we tend to think and you can see why of course of this is a European war in which the Asian war is in some sense a kind of appendix a one of the things I found in contemplating writing about the Second World War of course is that we now have an extraordinarily rich literature about the Middle East at war about Southern Asia about Eastern Asia to make us realise of course this was a war that affected all parts of the globe but particularly the Middle East and Mediterranean particularly South and East Asia and it is impossible to write the history of the war without being able to write about these diverse theatres and political systems third is the problem I think of definition well the definition is a Second World War thanks of course to Churchill his volumes I think are visible on the shelf behind me but of course it's many wars now this was something that AGB Taylor argued many years ago of course that you can't understand as simply as a war between Britain, France and Germany but there are many wars but he was thinking largely of international conflict of regular wars I think one of the important changes in the historiography of recent years has been to recognise there are very different kinds of wars going on there's war from below as well as if you like war from above there's wars for liberation as well as wars between states and the work of people like Donny Dlookstein or Ernest Mandel has highlighted the extent to which if we leave out this war from below we are missing a very important dimension of the conflict I think we can distinguish perhaps three different kinds of war going on over the period that I've described wars between states and these are of course the major military conflicts that can afford to wage war on that kind of scale wars between states either as aggressors or as defenders and civil wars civil wars like the civil war in Ukraine or in China or in Italy or in Greece or even Spain in fact which can be integrated I think into our larger story and these civil wars really about the future system what is the future system going to be and then there are what I call civilian wars these are the wars of self-defence and the one that strikes me most perhaps is the organisation of civil defence against bombing again is something which we always think of as happening during the blitz etc etc but civil defence was worldwide everywhere you had to prepare for the prospect of being bombed and civil defence required an extraordinary self-defence on the part of the civilian community I've calculated that by 1941-42 there are something like 30 million people in Europe enrolled in one form of civil defence or other then there's another kind of civilian war which are wars of liberation these are wars of resistance these are insurgences but not just insurgences against the Axis occupiers against the Japanese or the Germans there are insurgences of course and civil movements against the British or the French in their imperial possessions the aim of these kinds of civilian wars of course is liberation liberation from empire, liberation from occupation now these three wars are not the same though of course they do clearly overlap a great deal or even converge Yugoslavia for example and the resistance their efforts converge with the efforts of the regular war perhaps one good example is Italy if you stop the clock at the moment at the end of the war in northern Italy you have an extraordinary mix of forces an extraordinary mix of conflicts there you've got the states war between the western allies and the German occupiers you've got the civil war between fascist and non-fascist or anti-fascist Italians you've got the civilian war trying to cope with the impact of bombing and trying of course to accelerate the liberation of the Italian people there are plenty of other different groups around in northern Italy at the end of the war which again suggests how confusing our history of the war is I think perhaps of the Jewish Brigade 5,000 soldiers who were recruited from Palestine the British refused to allow them to fight but finally did relent at the end under American pressure and the Jewish Brigade ended up on the Italian front at the point of German surrender but busily hoarding away weapons and equipment so that they could be shipped or smuggled somehow to Palestine where they would help with the insurgency against the British who they've been fighting side by side with in Italy well I won't bore you with more details about the Po Valley in 1945 but it's a good example I think of just how complex the various trajectories are which bring people together in the second world war now what I want to do and I want you to indulge me in this I'm afraid what I want to do for the rest of my lecture really is to explain how I want to configure the war and it does seem to me that what we need for the second world war is a very broad historical framework a contextualization to be able to make proper sense of the nature of the conflict and the reason the conflict broke out now much of what I'm going to say is not I think particularly original but it's important I think to be able to set that war in perhaps a rather unfamiliar context and that's really what I'm intending to do this evening now I see the second world war as the last imperial war what I mean by that is the end of a very long period of European-led imperial expansion and its imitation particularly its imitation by Japan which was self-consciously modelled on the colonial practices of the European states now if you see the second world war as the last imperial war and I'll make clear perhaps in a moment what I mean by that we have to start I think in the late 19th century and this might seem a very long way back from the second world war but it is important to start in the 19th century to recognise the extent to which the forces which finally generated but the first and the second world war were already in a sense anticipated by an earlier history now this is a period of course of the so-called new imperialism when European states expanded to all those parts of the world did not yet be able to touch or to put frontiers around but it's also an extraordinary period of political and social transformation of economic change, mass urbanisation and the greatest of mass politics and part of the one of the consequences of that process of course was the need to define the nation much more clearly and indeed there are some nations well if the new nations, Germany, Italy, Meiji, Japan in particular which were very sensitive to this issue of how to define what the nation meant but for all nations, European nations and for Japan during this period empires came to be seen as a kind of extension of the new nationalism helping to define the nation and its destiny encouraging national competition exporting what we call the civilising mission the creation of what Robert Gerfart has called the nation empire which I think is quite a good term really to describe this 19th century change now the elites, military, social, commercial needed to canalise and control these changes in some way and combat radical mass politics by emphasising empire as beneficial this is particularly true of course in new countries like Japan, Germany and Italy but also true of countries with established empires like Britain and France or new imperialists like Belgium, all countries like the Netherlands all of these countries began to put frontier posts up around their colonies and protectorates to define where their empire was because again this was seen in some sense as a way of defining the nation it didn't necessarily work of course empire during this period is much more muted in its public appeal in the case of the 1920s and 1930s the process of globalisation of course is still going on indeed the possession of global empires by the British and the French for example helped to accelerate that process but the problem before 1914 of course is areas to colonise are running out it's no accident that from the 1890s onwards these powers began to look increasingly at China and the Middle East as the remaining soft areas where it might be possible to build up some kind of empire it's striking that most of the conflicts before 1914 the Boxer Rebellion, the South African War, the Russo-Japanese War the almost war over the Moroccan crisis, the Italian Turkish War all of these suggested a range of unstable regional zones in the existing world wide partly as a result of new nationalism partly as a result of new imperialism one of the effects of that of course was to encourage large military build up national competition meant you had to be able to protect your national and indeed your global interests militarily it's also striking I think during this period how much the appeal of the Darwinian view of the world affected people's view of national competition and imperial rivalry biological metaphors were widely used before the First World War and then again in the 1920s and the 1930s as if somehow other competition between the states mirrored the competition in nature the language of European Japanese even American engagement with the wider world reflected this intellectual shift now in 1914 you should know there came general war I'm not going to get into arguments about who started it and why but it clearly is important to emphasise the extent to which this national and imperial competition fed into what ought to have been a rather different crisis in 1914 and indeed the unraveling of the Balkans and the unraveling of the Middle East during the period before 1914 certainly played a part in encouraging dynastic empires to try to defend their crumbling position what we can say I think is that general conflict was fuelled by imperial and national rivalry distrust the special world of the military and so on in other words the things I've been describing as phenomena before 1914 fed into the final crisis the First World War and of course at the end of the war but dynastic empires did indeed all collapse as many in Austria-Hungary had predicted now 1918-19 the so-called peace settlement confirmed the importance of empire for the winners for Britain and France, for Japan and Asia even Belgium which got its share of German colonies under the League of Nations mandate system we'll note as a mandate to prepare these countries for these peoples for independence the map was in coloured in French and British and Belgian colours the Middle East now became a centre point of imperial strategy certainly for Britain and East Asia became a centre point of focus for Japan now this was a strange phenomenon because in fact the war or the end of war had showed that empire posed many problems empire was not of course necessarily a source of strength it could also be a source of crisis and weakness partly because precisely that nationalism which had fuelled European rival before 1914 had been exported very quickly of course to colonial empire areas where elites wanted the chance to develop independent states of their own so in 1919-1921 widespread violence from protest in India, in Korea, in Egypt, in China against European domination and so on and so on now things calmed down in the 1920s but actually throughout the end of war years empire was something difficult to manage not necessarily the great advantage that it was presented as and what seems to me to be important in the 1920s and 1930s is the illusion that empire mattered that it was a way of defining your nationality defining yourself as in some sense superior carrying out that civilising mission preparing the rest of the world for its own liberation now the irony of course is that for most European populations as the new history of European imperialism has shown for most European populations empire actually wasn't particularly important and most people in Europe didn't go to the empire of course to then the empire is what they saw in the cinema what they read in picture books and so on and so on the illusion that empire mattered was something that governments managed to market much more effectively presenting empire as something which has reached its high point was a real paradox because this was really the point of crisis for European empire now Germany, Italy and Japan for different reasons were resentful at the outcome of war and the peace settlement Germany for obvious reasons but Japan too because Japan felt it was not being taken seriously and its colonial flames in East Asia ought to be taken ought to be regarded more benignly and Italy too because Italy had been promised territories in Europe which it didn't get as a result of the peace settlement and it's quite striking that in all three countries and we know this I think from a very rich vein of recent literature on imperial discourse in all three countries there was a discourse it began before the First World War but it became more pronounced in the 1920s on ideas of empire, living space new economic orders to replace the global order dominated by the British and the Americans national destiny Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese leadership reflected this intellectual shift but it didn't cause it and it's important I think to recognize the extent to which ideas about empire, ideas about how to correct the economic or international imbalances on how to project your national destiny externally all of this intellectual shift that occurred really before Hitler came to power before the Japanese began their process of imperialism in the 1930s and so on and I think it's very important to recognize the extent to which what the German historian Bette Cundes was called imperial fantasies flourished in the 1920s and 1930s and fed into the crisis that finally led to the outbreak of the Second World War Now the problem for those people with dreams of empire new empire was that there were new forces of course abroad much more cosmopolitan and anti-colonial in outlook Soviet communism and specifically Leninism of course challenged the whole idea of empire a national self-assertion and instead suggested that the world should be divided into classes and that communism was the wave of the future In the United States and among progressive circles in Europe there was strong hostility to colonialism and narrow nationalism Now this is fair to you like to the idea that the nation is your key source of identity it explains perhaps the appeal of fascism in Italy and Germany and the appeal of a kind of ultra nationalism in Japan as well Strengthening the nation, asserting racial identity challenging the Marxist and liberal international threats All of this was important to them if they were going to benefit at all from the idea of the nation empire It's quite interesting of course that in Germany as we know it's not just something associated with nationalism in Germany as well of course there was hostility to the Jews for alternationalists in Germany represented these twin threats they represented both communism and capitalism paradoxical though it seems it was possible for anti-Semites in Germany to see the Jew as a threat whether it was the Jew from Moscow or the Jew from Wall Street or the city of London What all these three countries shared during this period were what might call new value systems hostility to democratic liberalism as well as hostility to communism and this is the origin really of that profound ideological gulf which separated off the Axis aggressors during the Second World War from their enemies both Soviet and Western Now I would not argue that war was inevitable as a result of the things that I've been talking about though not certainly surprising The important thing of course is that the great war created conditions for prolonged economic crisis in the 1920s and 1930s despite the efforts to buy this crisis off using American money in the 1920s there emerged in the 1920s and even more sharply in the 1930s ideas of competing economic orders maybe restoring the old liberal trading global order and financial order was bankrupt maybe a new economic order would be necessary an economic order based on growing state control a communist model or a protectionist, imperialist, neocantalist model in which you dominated a particular region its markets and its resources What these arguments represented of course was a desire to fragment in some sense a global order which had been growing steadily over the course of the 19th and early 20th century but from 1929 onwards of course this sense of national competition the sense that needed to be different economic orders was encouraged by the fact of the economic recession it produced growing confrontation it produced so it was argued a growing need for empire for physical resources to control some kind of territorial area where you could seek your resources and develop new markets In that point of view I think 1929 and 1932 is a real turning point in explaining why the 30 years war remained a 30 years war it seemed to confirm the need for a new economic order Britain and France fell back increasingly on the empire as a kind of alibi in the 1930s while in Japan, in Italy and in Germany leaders, German leaders even before Hitler due lessons from the recession but it might now be necessary to move to a new international order in which they could dominate their own territorial and resource area and impose a harsh regime of protectionism or autarchy as it came to be known Now in Japan and Italy and Germany if you were going to do that successfully in the 1930s I would argue that three conditions were necessary first of all they had to do it while the west was weak and the west was weak not just in terms of its inability to defend its global empire which was increasingly evident but there was a kind of moral weakness too I don't mean by this appeasement but the problem for Britain and France of course was that it was difficult to deny others the opportunity for empire if you had empire yourself and indeed the Hall of Our Pact which was supposed to stitch up Ethiopia for Italy in 1935 is actually quite an honest acceptance on the part of British and French government that there's not much you can do to challenge other people's desire for empire if your priority is maintaining your own but there were other problems too which the three potential aggressors had to overcome they had to make sure that they could do what they wanted to do for international communism became too strong and it's very interesting to look at a quite famous document from the Third Reich the so-called four-year plan memorandum which was almost the only document that Hitler wrote himself during the whole course of the Third Reich in August 1936 he penned this long memorandum about the Germanist strategic future and in that memorandum he makes it clear that at some point in the next 10, maybe even 15 years the Soviet Union will be too strong for Germany to be able to do what it wants to do in Central or Eastern Europe and that the moment act has got to be now well it has now, it's in fact four years time five years time perhaps but before the Soviet Union becomes too strong the same factor of course would have influenced Japan which was always forced during 1920-1930 to look over its shoulder of what the Soviet Union was doing the third thing they had to consider of course was embarking on these programs of imperial restructuring before the United States became committed to restoring some kind of liberal economic order or maintaining its own overseas security in other words, all FIFA's thought that at some point in the 1930s there would be a window of opportunity that they could exploit in order to be able to begin this program of territorial expansion, economic reconfiguration now this was a dangerous path to embark on it's worth noting I think that all three of these states were opportunistic and cautious didn't rush to set up territorial empire opportunistic cautious always pushing the door a little bit open to see whether it would open a little bit further they also needed to overcome their own populations uncertainty about the possibility of war which they did of course by a vigorous propaganda campaign about saving the nation elevating the nation's special identity but it was a difficult kind of imperialism precisely because they were surrounded largely by sovereign states it was not like going off and conquering some part of Central Africa or taking over by force some imperial possession in Southern Asia it's quite striking if you think about it that all these programs of territorial expansion involved in the case of Manchuria, i.e. China, Ethiopia, Czechoslovakia, Poland sovereign states, not only sovereign states but sovereign states were members of the League of Nations so that expanding territorial in this sense rather than trying to repeat what countries had done in the 19th century seems with the passage of time increasingly fantastic or irrational what did they think they were doing the problem was that once they'd taken that first step and the first step in the case of Japan we might say was Manchuria first step in the case of Italy was Ethiopia the first violent step, of course really violent step for Germany of course was the invasion of Poland but that was preceded by the occupation of Czechoslovakia the problem was that once they had taken that first step it was almost impossible to reverse no Japanese government was going to say to the international community oh I'm terribly sorry we invaded Manchuria we're going to pull our troops out nobody in Italy in 1936, 1937, 1938 would have said oh we're very sorry that we've occupied Ethiopia we're going to withdraw now I'm not being facetious here but it does seem to me that what shapes the eventual conflicts for Second World War in Asia, the Mediterranean and in Europe are the fact that they burnt bridges in the 1930s and it was very difficult to reverse that process once it had started and indeed the occupation of Manchuria was soon followed by war in China Italy's ambitions in Ethiopia were soon followed by ambitions elsewhere in Albania then of course later on in Greece Germany's ambitions in Czechoslovakia are soon directed towards Poland or a sphere of influence in south-east Europe step by step once they had taken that first step step by step they all moved towards constructing some kind of new order of course we need to be aware it's not a new order at all it's an old-fashioned, mechanical, paratical economics a desire to simply seize resources and labour part and to create closed markets as people did in the 17th or 18th century and it's quite striking in all three states I'm talking about that they adopted colonial practice almost immediately in Poland, in Ethiopia and then of course the Japanese in Manchuria these were areas that were going to be colonised areas where they were going to send Germans and Japanese settlers where they were going to send two million Italian settlers to Ethiopia and so on and so on so irrational or fantastic that our ambitions seem they saw it really as simply an extension of colonial practice which went back 50, 60, 70 years on the 27th of September 1940 the three states signed in a solemn ceremony in Berlin and a repeat ceremony in Tokyo a so-called tripartite pact it still has not paid much attention to the tripartite pact because they see it as a piece of rhetoric but the tripartite pact is a very interesting document because it was a final statement after a decade of crisis and difficulty where these three states thought they'd almost done it and they make a commitment to each other to support their efforts to construct three new orders one in Europe, one in the Mediterranean in Africa and one in East Asia now what have Britain and France the major imperial powers well we all know of course from the history of the 1930s Britain and France were too troubled for much of this period so they were obstruct at first the ambitions of the three aggressor states they suffered from a wide variety of problems imperial overstretch, economic crisis anti-war populations, strong anti-war feelings strong anti-war movements in both Britain and France uncertain of the Soviet threat and it is very important to stress that it wasn't just Germany or the Japanese Germans or the Japanese were worried about the Soviet Union communism, it runs right through particularly British policy in the 1930s and there's one just small footnote actually which I think is an interesting footnote but in 1936 when the air ministry began to plan the new generation of heavy bombers it was Harris's job actually to draw up the memorandum to decide what kind of bomber they wanted and the memorandum doesn't say we want a bomber that can flatten Dresden Hamburg that's eventually what he got he says he wants a bomber that will be able to reach Soviet cities he wants a bomber that will first of all be able to fly from Middle Eastern bases to attack targets in the Soviet Union and hopefully to develop a heavy bomber in the 1940s which will be able to fly direct from the United Kingdom to attack targets in the Soviet Union I put in just a reminder I think in 1930s that Britain like Hitler's Germany shared this profound distrust of what the Soviet Union represented and the kind of threat that communism might pose to the survival of the empire For Britain in France there were too many regional crises of course to confront at once they couldn't confront them all at once in the end they finally decided that Hitler was the greater threat of the three and they would confront him first and they confronted him as we all know by creating a rather strange alliance both in France and Britain an alliance between imperial circles and elites who had a vested interest in sustaining the empire hoping that the empire in fact would have a great deal of shelf life left in it and a democratic population which could only really be mobilised for a second war in 1939 and the promise that this was a war to save civilization from the threat of fascism Well whatever the trajectory that brought people in to support the war in 1939 the effort was defeated everywhere in 1940 and 1942 Britain was not invaded and occupied but by the spring of 1942 most of the eastern empire had been lost France had been defeated Britain had been expelled from Europe the outlook seemed bleak indeed standing at the signing ceremony of the tripartite pact one might think that the Japanese, the Germans and the Italians were not being overindulgent and thinking that their new orders might be realised but of course we know that they miscalculated it was impossible in the end to leave the Soviet Union and the United States out of their calculations but how to build these fantasies of empire and to sustain them in the real world they were unrealistic due politically that's why in the end of course Hitler decided on Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union which had a number of advantages from Hitler's point of view it might help to defeat Britain it would carve out a large area of new empire in addition to what he already had in Eastern Europe and of course he would be able to defeat the communist Jewish enemy hence to Pearl Harbor in the end of Japanese too when they were calculating how they were going to be able to secure their domination of Eastern and South Eastern Asia there didn't seem in the end any other solution but to try to give the United States a bloody nose and prevent it from interfering in the process of empire building and they kept fighting of course once that had happened they kept fighting from fear of national extinction real fear of national extinction real fear that they'd bitten off more than they could chew in the end and that the international community might in fact find some way of dismembering them they were defeated of course by what we might regard as an anti-empire allied coalition but it's a strange anti-empire allied coalition because of course by the end of the war it contained both Britain and France both committed to the re-establishment of imperial power some way or other after 1945 but in fact 1945 did I would argue mark an important turning point this did defeat the last drive old-fashioned drive for territorial empire the United Nations and American power and Soviet power asserted that nation not empire would be the key unit geopolitically from 1945 onwards and that the economy would be a global one and not a fractured imperial one empire was dismantled post-war indeed what we have post-45 is the contraction of Europe to match the expansion of Europe in the 19th century both Britain and France fought a long and losing battle there were plenty of post-45 conflicts which related to the death throes of empire Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Madagascar, Algeria and so on but in the end the end for empire I would argue was inevitable the Cold War and superpower dominance replaced it whether of course the United States and the Soviet Union exercised their end form of empire is another story which I'm not going to become Bob Downing but victory was clearly as we all know ambiguous not for nothing did Michael Howard in fact title this book of essays on the 20th century Liberation or Catastrophe Thank you very much Well, a very few words two, thank you but I'd say them in triplicate first of all thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming for making this such an incredibly crowded occasion and for asking for such intelligent questions it all helps Thank you Richard Richard and I have known one another for a long time but I think this is the first time we have actually met on the soil where we learnt to teach history Richard was here well I was here for 20 years Richard for 25 and I think you will see both from Richard's performance and from mine that we did not waste our time when we were here at all I think I've read everything that you've written Richard and every single one is fresh, interesting, scholarly, provocative and doing all the things which historians should do which is increase one's knowledge and one's understanding I think everything you've said in each of your books is new, fresh, provocative Practically every book has sometimes infuriated me always stimulated me and I usually end by thinking the man's right bastard but it is so good to know that there is another one on the stocks which we will all look forward immensely to reading Thirdly, thanks obviously to the founders of this centre to Professor Meil, to Professor Edgerton I suspect to Professor Holden Reid I suspect also Professor Theo Farrell and I'm sure a number of other people who I don't know so much Thank you for founding the centre for doing all the things which as you have said I have always been interested in and hoped would continue Thank you even more for naming it after me I can't tell you how honoured I am by this I won't say that I'm speechless it takes a great deal more than that to make it speechless but it makes me very, very happy It's enough to have a Michael Howard room named after me that made me feel important somewhere where I could or my picture could beam approvingly and encouragingly on all the people who are doing research there and I will continue to do so indefinitely Secondly, to have my name up in lights in the strand together with those of such eminences as the Duke of Wellington and Desmond Tutu has made me feel how can I put it historic but to have the centre or military, the Michael Howard centre for the study of war has named after me has made me feel the only way I can say it it's made me feel immortal Thank you for coming this evening We have a wine reception and it's all set up just outside in the main foyer here so just one last round of applause for our speakers Thank you so much Richard


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