Alternate Views Of World War II- A 5-Book Reading List
By Romi Mahajan
02 August, 2015
Countercurrents.org
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
By David Glantz
The canonical Western histories of World War II gloss-over and trivialize the enormous contributions the Soviet Union made to the defeat of Nazism. In fact, serious historians understand that, as Colonel Glantz says, “the Red Army stopped Hitler.” The battles on the Eastern front were of tremendous proportions and 85% of Wehrmacht losses were incurred on the Soviet Front. In the West, the most discussed offensive of the war is D-Day/The invasion of Normandy; in fact, the D-Day battles are considered a mere skirmish compared to Operation Bagration, launched weeks earlier- this, the largest offensive of the War, pushed the Germans out of Soviet territory, all the way to the banks of the Vistula River in Poland.
Glantz, a former Colonel fluent in Russian, is the single most informed Western scholar on this area of study; this book is masterful and myth-busting.
The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet Front in American Popular Culture
By Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II
The history we read is the product of agendas, which are themselves the product of politics and power. In this path-breaking book, Smelser and Davies discuss the ways in which the WW 2 histories that we grew up reading in the West drew from a historical project, stemming from Cold War priorities, in which the enormous Soviet contribution to the War was diminished and in which the “evils” of the Nazi machine were located in Hitler’s person instead of in his fighting forces and military leadership. Drawing on extensive research and using examples from popular culture, the authors expose the irony that while most of us were reared on a visceral hatred on Nazism, much of the history we read was written by former Nazis who were fervent anti-Soviets.
The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945
By Jorg Friedrich
The second part of the phrase “all’s fair in love and war,” while a cliché seems to be a good assessment of what governments do in times of conflict. In World War II, clearly the Nazi regime believed that acts of horrible violence were desired as did the Japanese empire. But any large conflagration is always more complex than it appears, especially when our understanding thereof is gleaned from redacted and partial histories. Jorg Friedrich’s path-breaking work is, therefore, a salutary corrective to “one-way history.” From this work, we learn that the Anglo-Americans felt it justified to mercilessly bomb the German civilian population for the duration of the War- a campaign that collectively killed over 750,000 men, women, and children. Most people have heard of the fire-bombing of Dresden but few have heard about the bombing of Hamburg (for instance.) War is savage and as Friedrich points out, savagery is not simply the province of the initial aggressors.
Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
By Madhusree Mukerjee
Wars create mythologies; Powerful people are often granted immortal status and imbued with sacrality by apologists. In an incredible convergence, World War II came accompanied with a clear “victor’s story” about good versus evil and about the resolute West fighting the reactionary forces of Nazism and Japanese Imperialism. The war also came accompanied with the deification of certain individuals, of which Churchill is the most supreme example. In the case of the British role in the War, the notion of a lone stalwart fighting Hitler alone has engendered in the common perception an exaggerated contribution of England in the War and has created, further, the mythology of a “benign and democratic” country fighting Nazism for the good of the World. Mukerjee punctures this myth by discussing in her powerful book the role that Indian rice and grain played in creating a food surplus in England as millions of Indians starved during the Bengal famine (the result of a wanton policy of racist abandonment of a colonized, subject people.)
As regards Churchill (whose name has come to be synonymous in the West with statesmanship), Mukerjee demonstrates with a scientist’s precision how the mistreatment of India was the direct result of Churchill’s deep-seated hatred of Indians and of his cynical view of the importance of Europeans over the peoples of the Third World. The War was not fought on Indian soil (largely) but the Indian contribution to the War (if death tolls indeed matter) is significant.
Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
By Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Few World War II myths are more persistent (in the US at least) than the notion that the use of the atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved lives” and that, as such, it was morally justifiable. In fact, the calculus around their use was incredibly complex as the history of May-August 1945 unfolded. Drawing on an extensive reading of Japanese, Soviet, and United States history and archival material, Hasegawa concludes that the Bombs were used more as a foil to Soviet power than as a justifiable war-time decision based on military needs.
Romi Mahajan is the founder of KKM Group a marketing firm, an author, an investor, and an activist. His career is a storied one, including spending 9 years at Microsoft and being the first CMO of Ascentium, an award-winning digital agency. Romi has also authored two books on marketing- the latest one can be found here . A prolific writer and speaker, Mahajan lives in Bellevue, WA, with his wife and two kids. Mahajan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, at the age of 19. He can be reached at [email protected]
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