Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan Read Free Book Online

the series, he wanted to be able to select individual contributors who were reputable and independent academics, not military specialists. Furthermore, his historians were to have complete access to the written record and a free hand to use what they found, provided it did not jeopardize national security.As a consequence, the British official histories are informative, frank, and at times controversial. The one on the bomber offensive against Germany, for example, deals bluntly with the disagreements in the air force’s high command over whether area bombing, which was preferred, or precision bombing was the most effective way of damaging Germany. What that former strategy meant in practice was to target cities and towns rather than smaller sites, such as munitions factories or oil depots. When the Air Ministry objected in 1959 to the volume on the grounds that revealing such debates might damage the Royal Air Force, the secretary to the cabinet, Sir Norman Brook, gave a firm answer. The histories, he argued, were not meant to whitewash the record. Rather, by dealing with the difficult issues, they would help future governments learn from past mistakes.
    Blunt histories do not always meet with warm approval. Noble Frankland, the historian who wrote the official history of the bombing campaign, found himself the subject of vicious personal attacks. Although he had himself flown in the campaign and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the conservative press in the United Kingdom insinuated that he had been judged unfit. (He had in fact been grounded for about eight weeks with pneumonia, after which he went back into the air over Germany.) Frank-land, his critics wrongly claimed, had not been there, and only those who had taken part in the fighting could possibly understand it. Many of his most vociferous critics admitted that they had not read his book or had read only parts of it, but that did not inhibit them in the slightest. Frankland’s suggestions that the resources used in the bombing might have been better applied elsewhere in the last months of the war, or that its effectiveness in destroying German morale was open to question, were rapidly inflated into charges that he had called the whole campaign “a costly failure,” words he certainly never used. He was insulting, itwas claimed, the memory of all those who had died and hurting the feelings of the survivors and their families. He was, said one member of Parliament, typical of those cynical and unscrupulous writers who hoped to make money by writing sensational exposés. The charges leveled against Frankland find a parallel in those being made today about the Canadian War Museum’s exhibit on the same bombing campaign. The museum, its critics say, has wrongly suggested in a plaque titled “An Enduring Controversy” that the mass bombing of German industry and German cities and towns was both immoral and ineffective. What the plaque actually said was, “The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested.”
    As so often is the case, the ways the public reacts to the work of historians have much to do with the issues of the time. In the late 1950s, Britain was going through a painful period of reexamination as it adjusted to its diminished importance in the world and its manifest social and economic problems at home. The Suez adventure of 1956 had been a costly disaster, and although the new Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, made much of his nation’s special relationship with the United States, it was quite clear which country was the dominant partner. The empire was melting away; indeed, Macmillan had just made his famous speech about the wind of change blowing through Africa when he had to decide whether or not to let Frankland’s volume be published. World War II assumed ever greater importance as the glorious and gallant moment when all British pulled together and Britain was one of the Big