The top secret report Some Weaknesses in German Strategy and Organisation 1933 - 1945 was prepared by Whitehall’s highest intelligence body, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and presented to Britain’s Chiefs of Staff in 1946 to 'set down certain aspects of the War whilst there are still sources available who were closely connected with the events described'.
Now, this report is published for the first time and set against its historical setting in new book, Defeating Hitler: Whitehall's Secret Report on Why Hitler Lost the War, by Paul Winter. Encompassing a wide range of issues from the peculiar idiosyncrasies of Hitler's personality to the failures of the German intelligence services, this previously classifed paper charts the rise, decline and fall of the Third Reich through 200 pages of considered intelligence reporting. Winter also provides biographies of key figures referenced in the report and a timeline of the crucial events of the Second World War.
The publication of Some Weaknesses will serve to dissuade present and future students of history from underestimating the power of Hitler's war machine and from forgetting how close it came to winning the war.
You can preview the book here and it's in UK shops now (US in July).
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Books
31 May 2012
23 May 2011
Thor the Movie: Politics with a Hammer - A guest post by Martin Arnold, author of Thor: Myth to Marvel
Judging solely from box office receipts in excess of $360 million by mid-May, more than double what it cost to make, Kenneth Branagh’s Thor is a resounding success, easily good enough for the Paramount/Marvel Studios team to justify the sequel hinted at in the film’s closing scene. For the vast majority of film-goers, seeking their fix of CGI-ed thrills and spills, Thor will have delivered. Two other camps, however, may be less than awed. Firstly, there will be the Old Norse mythology pedants who will mutter through clenched teeth that Thor is a travesty of the Icelandic eddas. Secondly, there will be the die-hard fans of Marvel’s The Mighty Thor, who will have noted a good number of deviations from Marvel’s comic-book plot history, as it has somewhat messily evolved over the last fifty years. As regards the eddic pedants, no-one will listen or care, for such nit-picking is beside the point, and, in any case, Marvel’s relationship with mythological niceties was only ever an opportunistic one. As regards the die-hards (the geeks, that is), they have a point. Sort of.
As a superhero, Thor presented problems from the outset. The intention of the creators of The Mighty Thor, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was clearly to capitalise on the Superman dual or hidden identity formula. So, the outcast god is Don Blake on Earth, a half-crippled medic who has taken a shine to his nurse assistant, Jane Foster, an attraction that his alter-ego is more successful is pursuing. While this worked fine for Superman, in Thor’s case it simply could not, for Thor has another life in Asgard, which simply cannot be reconciled with his Earthbound selves. Aware of this awkwardness, Marvel’s solution was to write Jane out of the series, so that Thor can be with his actual mythological wife, Sif, and gradually to drop the Don Blake device. Thor thus became Thor on earth as he is in heaven. One consequence of this was that Thor-the-protector-of-mankind (his unique role in the eddas, by the way, so no problem for the pedants there) had a rather limited role on Earth. Of course, the fallout from the family drama in Asgard, notably involving his dad, Odin, and his jealous sibling, Loki, provided a fair amount of Earthly tribulations but inevitably ones that soon exhausted themselves. Rule number one of the comic book is that the storyline must constantly reinvent itself and the chances of doing this with Thor lay in the cosmos not on Earth, which has also featured less and less in Thor’s comic-book adventures.
Fully aware of all this, the movie’s scriptwriters have gone back to the drawing board and started again. The fundamental scheme of the film is the two worlds scenario of all fantasy fiction, in which the hero moves from one world to another and in so doing learns some fundamental truth about him/herself and life in general. This is the ‘maturation fable’ whose roots in folktale are as old as the hills. Usually, this learning process entails a shift from a banal world (typically home) to a hyperbolic world (everything home is not) of mind-boggling beings; for example, Luke Skywalker leaves the farm and discovers the galaxy, or Bilbo/Frodo Baggins quits the Shire and undergoes world-changing adventures in Middle Earth. In Thor, somewhat ingeniously, it’s the other way round, for it is on Earth, without recourse to magic weaponry or any superpowers, other than those possessed by a body-building kung-fu fighter, that Thor gets in touch with his inner self and so finds a more subtle response to events, rather than just bashing people with his hammer. Thanks for this are due solely to his chance encounter and subsequent embroilment with a radical astrophysicist, a certain Jane Foster (an ex, she says at one point, of Don Blake).
Yet, while Thor, the exiled god, slowly comes to see that the common ground between high politics (for which read both his dysfunctional family in Asgard and the looming threat of the Frost Giants) and love (for which read the starry-eyed Jane) is duty and responsibility, Thor, the movie, hints at a much wider concern than mere personal salvation. In this case, the issue is national salvation or, to put it another way, the problems of twenty-first century American foreign policy.
The premise of the film is that the Frost Giants, once vanquished in 965 AD (for some reason) when they tried to conquer Earth, are set on reviving their ambitions for cosmic domination. For this they need the Casket of Ancient Winters, an ecological Pandora’s Box currently housed in the vaults of Asgard. At the very moment that Odin is about relinquish the throne to Thor, a handful of them enter Asgard in an attempt to retrieve it. They fail but, despite Odin’s caution, Thor and his chums decide to take the war to the Giants. They fail too but the consequence is that the gods who ‘brought peace to the universe’ have now brought war to it. It may be fatuous to spell this out but I’ll risk it: the most powerful realm around is violated by its ancient enemies and then launches an ill-advised war, one, it seems, that it cannot win. And so the trouble starts, not so much with the Frost Giants, whose leader, Laufey, lives in a cave in a faraway place, but inside Asgard. What should be done? How can this be settled? Odin favours diplomacy. Loki, the enemy within, whose double dealing is only explained in Oedipal terms, favours cunning. Thor, who peaked too early with the wrong answer, is packed off to Earth to learn the lessons of good governance. This, in a place where the national context is Iraq and Afghanistan, which are mentioned several times, and homeland security, or S.H.I.E.LD., is very nervous of people and things that clearly aren’t normal, like Thor, his hammer and meddlesome astrophysicists.
It doesn’t pay to push the analogies too far, although they are clearly meant, especially in the vexed case of Loki, for whom the accommodating strategies of multiculturalism would not go amiss, suggests Odin and, eventually, the more dovish Thor. Yet whatever all this navel-gazing about the role of being top dog might signify, the film resists any gung-ho or feelgood solutions. The Giants may be thwarted for now but the cost, it seems, is a deeply uncomfortable isolationism, particularly so for the future prospects of Thor and Jane. The course of high politics - like families, like sexual passion – does not run smooth. In this respect, Thor is an honest film. Just how much fun it is has already been decided by the queues at the box office.
-- Martin Arnold, May 2011
08 December 2010
27 October 2010
21 October 2010
01 October 2010
30 September 2010
New History catalogue now online!
Continuum History 2011 Catalogue
Lots of new books coming up - there's still plenty to interest the general reader, but we're also expanding our range of student guides and research titles over the next year or so too.
We're particularly developing our Ancient/Classical History list, including new student series Continuum Sources in Ancient History, and we've also got lots more Medieval History books, from the fun A Hermit's Cookbook to research work The Wine Trade in Medieval Europe 1000-1500, as well as a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh, a much-anticipated paperback edition of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and Their Place in History and, of course, lots of new Modern and Military History books - including Jeremy Black's The Great War and the Making of the Modern World and Richard Overy's edited collection Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945.
This is a very brief summary - I'll let you see the rest for yourself!
Carly
