An Evening with Antony Beevor 

On Monday 13th October,  we were fortunate to host a lecture by Antony Beevor on the topic of his latest book, The Second World War. Over the past few decades, the Second World War has become so vast and various a phenomenon – so many wars in one – that anyone who tries to contain it within a single lecture has to make hard choices. Beevor was at the top of his game, in command of a huge range of sources, with a fine eye for place, detail and delivery, deftly manipulating incident and character, and making effective use of soldiers’ diaries and letters to create a vast human tapestry of war.

Beevor spoke intriguingly on one neglected area, relations between Moscow and Tokyo, whilst endorsing current ‘revisionist’ approaches to American policy in China. He argued that Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek)and his Nationalist army, far from being idle, corrupt and uninterested in fighting the Japanese, made the best of a very difficult situation and that American policy makers, instead of constantly denigrating Chiang, should have concentrated on keeping him in play as a strong counter weight to Mao’s Communists. The boys who chose to attend this lecture will now have a much broader appreciation of the contrasting fronts in the Second World War.