World War Two: Our Finest Hour?
Saturday 5 June at 4:55pm

On the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, four intellectual heavyweights discuss the legacy of World War 2 in a debate chaired by Jonathan Freedland, political editor of The Guardian. Historians Antony Beevor, Joanna Bourke, Niall Ferguson and Jorg Friedrich provide a trenchant and lively discussion.

The Second World War was the defining event of the 20th century and its outcome laid the basis for a profound change in the distribution of power across the globe. Among other things, you can give it the credit or the blame for:

• America's economic domination of the world (via the Marshall plan)
• The technological revolution in Japan
• The Berlin Wall
• The United Nations
• The European Union
• The Middle East crisis

There were also less tangible changes in the dominant morals and attitudes.

Joanna Bourke's book An Intimate History of Killing, caused shock waves when it came out. A historian at Birkbeck College, London University, Dr Bourke has written on many subjects, including Ireland, women's experiences of poverty – and war. An Intimate History of Killing argues that many soldiers in recent wars have actively enjoyed killing the enemy.

Bourke says she was surprised when she came across the evidence – hundreds of diaries and letters lying in military archives, written by soldiers in World War One, World War Two and Vietnam. One soldier described the first time he bayoneted a German soldier as 'gorgeously satisfying'; another confessed that blowing up the enemy, seeing body parts flying into the air and hearing the screams of the wounded, had been 'one of the happiest moments of my life'.

An Intimate History of Killing has won prestigious prizes, but has also been attacked by veterans' associations as well as by other academics, notably Antony Beevor (see below). Beevor has been quoted as saying that Bourke follows 'a pretty feminist agenda' and doesn't pay enough attention to the effects of fear on soldiers. Bourke points out that her book includes evidence of women being just as eager as men to kill, and insists that she is not judging the soldiers. Firing her own broadside back at the critics, she says she finds 'frankly disturbing' the kind of history that presents soldiers as passive victims and ignores the fact that they were sent into war to kill.

Antony Beevor is a military historian, author – and Visiting Professor at Bourke's college, Birkbeck. He has written extensively on the Second World War, and achieved bestsellerdom with his two most recent books, Stalingrad and Berlin: The downfall, which document those bloody, gruelling episodes from the point of view of ordinary soldiers.

Beevor served in the army when he was younger, and has great empathy with the soldiers he writes about: 'Outsiders sometimes fail to understand that armies are very emotional organisations; on the surface is discipline and hierarchy but the emotions boiling underneath are terribly strong.' That said, he doesn't shrink from presenting the horrors of war in all their ferocity, complete with wrenching human details.

Some readers claim to have detected a political bias, suggesting that he finds it easier to portray the atrocities of Soviet troops than of German, British or American soldiers. Certainly Berlin: The downfall caused an outcry in Russia because of its account of Soviet brutalities, including mass rapes. The Russian ambassador called it 'an act of blasphemy', but Beevor staunchly defends his claims, pointing out that most of them are based on material in Russia's own archives. He suggests that nations can only acknowledge the truth about their behaviour in war when they become prosperous. 'Germany really started to face up to the horrors of its past after it had an economic miracle,' he said.

'I believe a liberal empire can do good,' said Niall Ferguson at Hay last year. The Scottish-born historian is currently Professor of Financial History at New York University and argues vigorously that America needs to accept that it is now an imperial power. Pointing out that the US has military bases in three quarters of the world's countries, and owns over 30% of the world's wealth, he advises America to rely less on military might and to learn from the British experience of ruling through civil administrations. Not surprisingly, he has fans among the American neo-Cons, though his views make many Brits and Europeans queasy.

Ferguson first attracted attention by compiling the book, Virtual History, a collection of essays in which historians imagine how key events in history might have turned out differently. He then wrote The Pity of War, in which he argued that Britain was wrong to fight World War One, because Germany's expansionism was directed eastwards and was no threat to British interests. He has also written Empire: How Britain made the modern world, which praises aspects of British imperialism. His latest book is Colossus: The rise and fall of the American empire.

Born in 1944 to German parents from Essen, Jörg Friedrich identifies himself as belonging to 'the generation of sons who questioned their parents. We asked: "What happened in the war? Where were you in 1941 when the first Jews were deported? Who wrote for the Nazi papers?"'

Friedrich spent most of his career writing about Nazi atrocities, but then he turned his questioning on to Allied military tactics. For 10 years he researched the Allied carpet bombing of Cologne and other German cities, and its firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg. The result was an incendiary book, The Fire: Germany under bombardment 1940-1945, which asked if Britain and America had deliberately bombed women, children and refugees. It provoked an emotional response in Germany, reawakening survivors' memories. While many Allied historians refute Friedrich's use of the term 'massacre', they acknowledge that there is a question to answer.

For years arguments have rumbled uneasily in the UK about whether the British bombing of civilian areas was morally justifiable. Prominent British historians, including John Keegan and Max Hastings, have criticised the bombing campaigns, though they would probably stop short of Friedrich's claim that the Allies must share responsibility with Hitler for 'abolishing the principles and traditions which protected civilians from war since the Christian knights'.

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