19 Jun 2012 01:57:45
In doing so, he is playing to his strengths. Many of the chapters on the Nazi-Soviet war find Beevor at the top of his game, in command of a huge range of sources, with a fine eye for place and detail, deftly manipulating incident and character, and making effective use of soldiers' diaries and letters to create a vast human tapestry of war. The prose is relaxed and retains a spring in every paragraph. He excels, too, at grand strategy – as a diplomatic historian, he is a match for AJP Taylor. The conferences at Casablanca, Tehran, Yalta and so on, which can have their longueurs, here sparkle with wit and insight, especially into the behaviour of Stalin. There are revelations too: for example, that the "rightwing fanatic" who so conveniently murdered Admiral François Darlan in Algiers in 1942 happened to be working for the British Special Operations Executive. But, although the fall of France is magnificently told, the later campaigns in western Europe don't engage Beevor in the same way and the writing, while always lucid and authoritative, is much more detached.
Elsewhere, Beevor's choices are not so happy. The battlefield narrative method which worked so well in Stalingrad is less effective when dealing with the wider conflagration, where military events often matter less than the underlying forces of ideology, political geography, or industrial production. Beevor's technique of frog-marching his readers to the station and getting the train moving, exemplified by an opening chapter which gets the war going in a mere 10 pages, achieves momentum, but often at the expense of clarity. The limitations of the old-fashioned military approach are highlighted by the minute attention paid to the names of units and commanders and the bizarre practice of giving German generals (and only German) their full titles – as in "General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg".
There are also structural problems. Beevor's skill with sustained narrative is repeatedly undermined by a salami-slicing attention to chronology. Rommel's arrival in north Africa is brilliantly staged but his subsequent campaign in the desert is told in disconnected fragments, the discussion of whether Hitler was right to forbid a retreat in front of Moscow in December 1941 is sandwiched inside a chapter on Pearl Harbor, and the development of the Mustang fighter – which transformed the air war against Germany – is a throwaway paragraph in "The Soviet Spring Offensive".
Not only is too much space given to the eastern front, the narrative develops a relentlessness – one damn battle after another – thanks to a lack of variety in pace and vantage point – an odd failing from an admirer of Vasily Grossman. Beevor does devote a chapter to Nazi-occupied Europe, and gives a solid, unflinching account of the Holocaust, though he never personalises any of its victims; but he skimps on or simply ignores many important aspects of the war, including the Manhattan Project, Albert Speer's transformation of German armaments production and the development of Ultra signals intelligence. A book aimed at an international audience may leave British readers feeling short-changed: there is little on the Blitz, the Battle of Crete gets more space than the Battle of Britain, and William Slim, the outstanding British general of the war, gets only a few passing mentions.
Beevor is very good on one neglected area, relations between Moscow and Tokyo, but in general the sections on the far east are the weakest. There is an art to writing about the war in the Pacific, and he hasn't quite got it. You have to find some meaning behind the bloody events – whether it be in the triumph of American logistics, the complexities of racial hatred or the mechanised rape of island paradises. Beevor gives us a bald military narrative garnished with deft sketches of warlords such as the egomaniacal Douglas MacArthur. We never pause to share the life of an individual marine or Japanese infantryman.
On China, by contrast, Beevor does have a theme: he endorses the modern revisionist line that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalist army, far from being idle, corrupt and uninterested in fighting the Japanese, were making the best of a very difficult situation and that American policymakers, instead of constantly denigrating Chiang, should have concentrated on keeping him in play as a strong counterweight to Mao Zedong's communists, who would defeat him in 1949. Fair enough, but Beevor doesn't help his case by clumsy scene-setting and telling us little about what the communists were up to, while using hindsight to attack fellow travellers such as Agnes Smedley for not predicting the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Second World War is handsomely produced and generously priced but its oddities and imbalances suggest that Beevor has not had the editorial support that even a writer of his talents needs on so vast a project. One hopes this is not the shape of things to come in publishing.
