The Second World War still has a defining place in how we imagine war today, despite its increasing distance from us. The west has not experienced ‘major war’ since 1945, and so our comprehension of what it means has not had to be redefined. But the war, which we have invented for ourselves, is a caricature: a ‘good’ war fought for ‘necessary’ reasons by a generation of ‘heroes’. The implicit contrast is with the First World War, which is portrayed as none of these things.
This construction of the Second World War has created a massive obstacle to our capacity to understand the war of 1914-18 on its own terms. It too has become a caricature of itself: futile, wasteful and needless. Yet many of the concepts with which we frame modern war are derived from the First, not the Second, World War, including ‘grand strategy’, ‘total war’ and even ‘existential conflict’. The First World War changed what we mean by strategy with effects that still resonate. And the conflict has a further claim to our attention in this centenary period. The complexities and ambiguities that surround it can help us understand the place of armed conflict in our own world – its causes, conduct and termination – and often do so much better than the stories which we tell ourselves of the Second World War.
SPEAKER:
Sir Hew Strachan FRSE, Hon D. Univ (Paisley) was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and is now Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His recent books include The First World War: Volume 1: To Arms (2001), The First World War: an illustrated history (2003); related to a multi-part television series and translated into many languages, Clausewitz’s On War: a Biography (2007), and The Direction of War (2013). He is the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (revised edition, 2014), and a clutch of volumes arising from his Directorship of the Oxford Changing Character of War Programme.