Website review picks, Dan’s 12-1 seminar

Once you’ve checked with Dan, put up your choices as comments here.

Website review picks, Dan’s 11-12 seminar

Once you’ve checked with Dan, put up your choices as comments here.

Website review picks, Helen’s 2-3 seminar

Once you’ve checked with Helen, put up your choices as comments here.

Website review picks, Helen’s 12-1 seminar

Once you’ve checked with Helen, put up your choices as comments here.

Website review picks, Helen’s 11-12 seminar

Once you’ve checked them with Helen, put up your sites as comments here.

Website Reviews

Over the coming weeks you need to be identifying websites to review. Have a think for a moment about how you’re going to do this. Ask yourself some questions: what does Dan want to achieve by this? will it be enough to identify just the first few sites that you can find, or to Google ‘Britain Second World War? how can I use this to enhance my research and writing for my final essay?

I want to build up an annotated database that researchers can use to help pick their way through the confused mass of WW2 sites on the web. You are going to contribute to that, and help to create a lasting good from this course.

To do that, you are going to need to be adventurous and commonsensical in your searching. It’s fairly easy to find some Second World War bibliography or links sites, and nearly every website you visit will have some useful links highlighted. Spend some time going through these, and try to pick a variety of sites – think about who has set them up, what their purpose is, and how we can use them as historians. This task expects you to explore. But at the same time, you need to think ‘how useful is this site, and what will the markers think of the choice I have made?’ Try to impress us with what you choose and how you use it.

It is absolutely fine for you to pick sites which relate to your chosen topic for your research essay In fact, that would seem very sensible to me. But use the opportunity to pick a range of different sources.

Once you’ve chosen the sites, you need to do two things. First, check them with us – this is for your benefit, we’d like to be able to advise you if we think a site won’t be helpful to you. Second, once we’ve approved them, put up your choices as comments in the individual seminar posts above this one. Remember, you can’t pick the same sites as others in your seminar group.

Wartime deaths

As you’ll have seen from lots of my posts and lecture comments, one of the topics that fascinates me is the location, scale and representation of death in wartime Britain. The numbers of those who died are actually hard to ascertain – the Registrar General recorded the number of those who’d died due to ‘operations of war’, but what about those who died in industrial accidents resulting from the mobilisation of the workforce? What, for example, about the casualties from the catastrophic explosion at Fauld, the scars of which are still visible on the landscape? What about the railwaymen who died in this explosion at Soham? It’s notable that both occurred in 1944, when munitions were being built up for the final effort in Europe. But if we count these as ‘wartime deaths’, then we also need to factor in all those children who survived because of increased nourishment thanks to national feeding schemes and the departure of men to war.

Semester 2, Weeks 1 and 2 reflection

We’ve now shifted onto the military history section of the course. In the past two weeks I’ve lectured on the campaign in France 1940, the Battle of Britain, the Malayan campaign 1942, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the strategic bombing campaign against Germany (phew, that is quite a lot). I’ve had two aims – first to try to introduce some key concepts in military history, analytical tools which I think are useful in interpreting the writing as well as the historical events; and second to stress the degree to which military effectiveness is the result of a complex web of factors. It’s never enough to look at one piece of technology/intelligence breakthrough/example of leadership as a ‘battle winner’ in itself. Particularly with the campaigns at sea and in the air, I’ve tried to highlight the cumulative nature of success in attritional warfare, the difficulty in discerning a ‘decisive moment’ at the time, and the multiplicative effect of success – ie once the Allies gain air superiority and French airfields/navigational bases, then the degree of damage that can be inflicted by air power on the Reich increases exponentially. I’m conscious that we’ve done a lot in a short space of time, and I want to try to achieve two more things over the next couple of weeks. First, I want to return to a definition of ‘military effectiveness’ and re-emphasise that it is socially and culturally related: something we’ll see clearly with the performance of the British army in NW Europe after 1944. Second, I’ve felt uncomfortable that with so much discussion so quickly, the experiences of men on the ground/in the air/on the sea have been left out. In the end, these battles weren’t fought by men on maps. So I’m going to replace the future lecture on intelligence and subversion with one on the experience of armed forces personnel.

My seminars haven’t all worked the way I’d have liked. This is due to mutual over-work, I expect, with students feeling that they’re spending time on assessment, rather than preparation, and me taking the easy route of intervening rather than ceding control. In the coming weeks, I’m going to try to identify at least one point in each seminar to keep my mouth shut before it opens!

Lecture change of location

Please note that despite the bad weather today’s lecture will go ahead. We will be in a different room this semester – Laws G4

Happy New Year and reading for the first week of the semester

I suspect that many of us will have been so taken up with other work over the break that we’re only just turning our minds to preparation for next week’s seminar. Certainly, I omitted to supply you with the requisite reading before the end of last semester. If you are able to go into QMUL at any point between now and next Wednesday, you will find the key reading in a box marked ‘Britain in the Second World War’ in front of the history reception desk on the third floor of the Arts building. It contains both Williamson Murray’s chapter on Military Effectiveness (which will be useful for the next three seminars) and an excerpt from Brian Farrell’s book on the defence and fall of Singapore. There are forty copies, so all students preparing to run the seminar should be able to get access. Bearing in mind the utility of Murray’s chapter, the rest of you would also be well advised to pick up a copy. Please email me if there are any problems.

Looking back on the last semester as a whole, I’m pleased by how much ground we covered, and especially happy to see so much understanding of the big themes of the war displayed in the student book reviews that I’ve been marking. Both for seminar leaders and for students, this course’s attempts at giving you more responsibility for your own learning sometimes make classroom interactions seem halting, but I hope that, over the course of the year, you’ll feel that they also help to build your ability to take on the intellectual challenges presented by assessment.