Purnell's History of the Second World War was a hugely successful weekly anthology or 'partwork' publication covering all aspects of the Second World War that was distributed throughout the English-speaking world. Produced shortly before the similarly accomplished 8-volume series on the First World War, it was first published in 1966, being reprinted several times during the 1970s. [1] The magazine was notable for its use of many writers – often well-known military figures – of many nationalities to present a rounded view of the subject. This was combined with high-quality original artwork of the military hardware used, maps and numerous unseen photographs, some of them quite gruesome.
Despite the name, Purnell's History of the Second World War was published by Phoebus Publishing Ltd in co-operation with the Imperial War Museum, which provided its research facilities, expert advice, official statistics and photographs. The defunct Purnell & Sons, later British Printing Corporation, based in Paulton, Avon (Now Bath & North East Somerset), were the printers of the magazine. At the time, Purnell's were one of the largest and most advanced printing plants in Europe, and had developed a reputation for high quality printing, producing well-known titles such as the Observer Magazine and the TV Times. [2]
The editor, Barrie Pitt, had been involved in the production of the BBC Television series The Great War. Pitt and the editor in chief, the renowned military theorist and historian Sir Basil Liddel Hart, wanted to create a definitive record of the Second World War which could withstand academic scrutiny and be accessible to the general public. Each issue of the magazine contained articles on differing topics but typically, important or contentious events were viewed from both sides (e.g. Stalingrad: The German View, followed by another article, Stalingrad: The Russian View) to allow the writers to counter long held myths and set the record straight rather than merely to recycle familiar themes. Numerous famous military figures and former senior staff officers contributed articles; because it was originally published just over twenty years after the end of the conflict, many of the protagonists were alive.
Prominent historians such as John Keegan, Jerrard Tickell, W.H. Koch, Alvin D. Coox, Phyllis Auty, Martin Blumenson, Antony Brett-James, John Vader, Rudolf Bohmer, Raleigh Trevelyan produced articles, as well as AJP Taylor, who acted as editor in chief for later editions after the death of Sir Basil Liddel Hart. Other well-known contributors to the publication included the MP Alan Clark and the best-selling author Dudley Pope. Witness accounts from otherwise anonymous individuals, such as a Japanese housewife telling of the horrors of life after the surrender and the testimony of a former Zero pilot, were also included. John Batchelor contributed 1,163 illustrations. [3]
Despite the efforts to tell the story from alternative viewpoints, many of the events being discussed remained controversial and sensitive subjects, and there was still scope for Cold War propaganda and government censorship to find its way into print. In issue 45, which covered the Katyn Massacre, the discovery of the bodies of several thousand captured Polish officers in 1943, which was widely believed to have been carried out by the Soviets and which remained an unmentionable subject between the Allies after the war, the historian Jerrard Tickell attempted to reconstruct the events around the atrocity which took place at the Hill of Goats site. While pointing to the evidence, he left his conclusion open ended, finishing with the comment that it was up to the reader to form an opinion. His article was followed by a piece by a Soviet scientist purporting to be a forensic re-examination of all the evidence such as the conditions of the bodies, their levels of decomposition and the remaining artefacts to 'prove' that the Polish officers could have only been murdered during the period of the German occupation of the region. Using witness accounts, selective testimonies and the findings of the official Russian investigation into the affair, Doctor of Juridical Sciences Arkady Poltorak finished with the paragraph,
Thus was unmasked the provocative act of the Nazis, thus was established with complete clarity the fact of the monstrous killing by the Nazi authorities of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn Wood
During the Perestroika period in the early 1990s, the Russian authorities finally admitted that the killings had been carried out by the NKVD, the secret police organization used to enforce Stalin's rule.
The series was so successful that although it was initially scheduled to run to six volumes of 16 issues each, a further two volumes were added, covering later themes such as the Chinese Civil War, the Arab–Israeli Conflict, Suez, Korean War, Vietnam War, and the rise of nationalism which led to the end of the European empires in the years after the Second World War. There were also discussions on the spread of communism, tactics and battle strategy, the post war reconstruction, the use of propaganda, the work of war correspondents and artists, profiles of the leading politicians, generals and ambassadors and features on uniforms and medals. While the editorial comment justified this move as important for the reader to gain a rounded view of all the inter-connected events, it could also be considered a sound business move to extract as much financial reward for the publishers as possible. A series of higher quality 'specials' were also later produced which were themselves hugely successful, selling over 8 million copies world wide. [4] They were about elements of the Second World War and the First World War, e.g., Battleships of the First World War, The Desert War, German Secret Weapons, D Day: Invasion of Hitler's Europe and German Tanks 1939–1945. While popular, they included a great deal of material published in the main magazine. Though the magazine is long out of print, it is remembered as largely achieving what it set out to do and back issues are sought after.
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The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II, beginning when Nazi Germany and its Axis allies attacked and became locked in a protracted struggle with the Soviet Union for control over the Soviet city of Stalingrad in what is now southern Russia. The battle was characterized by fierce close-quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians in aerial raids; the battle epitomized urban warfare with it being the single largest and costliest urban battle in military history. It was the bloodiest and fiercest battle of the entirety of World War II—and arguably in all of human history—as both sides suffered tremendous casualties amidst ferocious fighting in and around the city. Today, the Battle of Stalingrad is commonly regarded as the turning point in the European theatre of World War II, as Germany's Oberkommando der Wehrmacht was forced to withdraw a considerable amount of military forces from other regions to replace losses on the Eastern Front. By the time the hostilities ended, the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army had been destroyed and Army Group B was routed. The Soviets' victory at Stalingrad shifted the Eastern Front's balance of power in their favour, while also boosting the morale of the Red Army.
Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski was a Polish military and political leader.
Camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland that existed during 1919–1924 housed two main categories of detainees: the personnel of the Imperial Russian Army and civilians, captured by Germany during World War I and left on Polish territory after the end of the war; and the Soviet military personnel captured during the Polish–Soviet War, the vast majority of them captured as a result of the battles of 1920. Locations of the camps included Strzałkowo, Pikulice, Wadowice, and Tuchola.
A partwork is a written publication released as a series of planned magazine-like issues over a period of time. Issues are typically released on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, and often a completed set is designed to form a reference work on a particular topic.
John Henry Batchelor MBE (1936-2019) was an English artist and technical illustrator, particularly known for his clear and detailed cutaway illustrations of vehicles and military equipment and stamp illustrations. His work can be seen in many hundreds of late-20th-century works on armour, fighting vehicles, ships, firearms, etc.. Batchelor's work is particularly sought after by scale model makers for its accuracy. He provided illustrations for many magazines such as Radio Times, TV Times and technical interest publications such as Popular Mechanics, Air & Space, and The Aeroplane.
Purnell and Sons started out as a small family printers based in Somerset which merged with other printers over the next 100 years to become one of the largest print groups in the UK and at one time a major publisher.
The Augustów roundup was a military operation against the Polish World War II anti-communist partisans and sympathizers following the Soviet takeover of Poland. The operation was undertaken by Soviet forces with the assistance of Polish communist units, and conducted from July 10 to July 25, 1945, in Suwałki and Augustów region of northern Polish People's Republic.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aircraft was a weekly partwork magazine by Aerospace Publishing which was published in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. The magazine was intended to eventually make up a multi-volume encyclopedia dedicated to aviation. First issued in 1981, the partwork comprised 216 issues, each of twenty pages, making up eighteen volumes. The first two issues were sold together for the price of one, subsequent issues were sold on their own.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 defenceless Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD, at Stalin's order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces.
The Gestapo–NKVD conferences were a series of security police meetings organised in late 1939 and early 1940 by Germany and the Soviet Union, following the invasion of Poland in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The meetings enabled both parties to pursue specific goals and aims as outlined independently by Hitler and Stalin, with regard to the acquired, formerly Polish territories. The conferences were held by the Gestapo and the NKVD officials in several Polish cities. In spite of their differences on other issues, both Heinrich Himmler and Lavrentiy Beria had similar objectives as far as the fate of pre-war Poland was concerned. The objectives were agreed upon during signing of the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty on 28 September 1939.
Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography is itself the subject of modern studies.
Wehrmachtbericht was the daily Wehrmacht High Command mass-media communiqué and a key component of Nazi propaganda during World War II. Produced by the Propaganda Department of the OKW, it covered Germany's military situation and was broadcast daily on the Reich Broadcasting Corporation of Nazi Germany. All broadcasts were authorized by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. Despite the latter's attempts to temper excessive optimism, they often exaggerated the success of the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht, leading historian Aristotle Kallis to describe their tone as "triumphalist".
Poland–Russia relations have a long and often turbulent history, dating to the late Middle Ages. Over centuries, there have been several Polish–Russian Wars, with Poland once occupying Moscow and later Russia controlling much of Poland in the 19th as well as in the 20th century, leading to strained relations and multiple Polish attempts at re-acquiring independence. Polish–Russian relations entered a new phase following the fall of communism, with relations warming under Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and later Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Relations began worsening considerably as a result of the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, and later the 2014 annexation of Crimea and especially the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Relations between the Polish and Russian governments have become extremely unfriendly, and according to a 2022 poll, only 2% of Poles view Russia positively, the lowest number in the world among countries polled.
After the Munich Agreement, the Soviet Union pursued a rapprochement with Nazi Germany. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II. The Soviets invaded eastern Poland on 17 September. Following the Winter War with Finland, the Soviets were ceded territories by Finland. This was followed by annexations of the Baltic states and parts of Romania.
The Montana Kaimin is the University of Montana's student-run independent newspaper located in Missoula, Montana. The paper is printed once a week, Thursday, with special editions printed occasionally and is online at MontanaKaimin.com. The Kaimin covers news, sports, arts and culture, and opinion.
Anti-Katyn is a denialism campaign intended to reduce and obscure the significance of the Katyn massacre of 1940 — where approximately 22,000 Polish officers were murdered by the Soviet NKVD on the orders of Joseph Stalin — by referencing the deaths from disease of thousands of Imperial Russian and Red Army soldiers at Polish internment camps during the Interwar period.
George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers was a British anthropologist and eugenicist who was one of the wealthiest men in England in the interwar period. He embraced anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism and became a supporter of Oswald Mosley, which led to him being interned by the British government for two years during the Second World War.
The Zambrów massacre was a war crime that took place on the night of 13–14 September 1939. It was one of the major war crimes of the Wehrmacht during the invasion of Poland. During that night, the makeshift prisoner-of-war camp in Zambrów was disturbed by a number of panicked horses, and more than 200 Polish soldiers, trying to move out of their way, were gunned down by German sentries. Some witnesses later said the horses had been purposely released into the camp by the German sentries, who used the incident as a pretext to massacre the prisoners.
Donald Boyle Stewart was a career United States Army officer. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1940, fought in North Africa with II Corps, and was captured during the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid on Valentine's Day February 14, 1943. While a captive of the Germans, Stewart and fellow POW Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr were selected to attend the Katyn Commission investigation into the Polish officers found murdered in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia. Stewart and Van Vliet Jr were U.S. Registered Code Users who sent coded messages from Oflag 64 to MIS-X in Fort Hunt New Jersey which identified the Soviets as the perpetrators of the massacre. After their liberation, they testified before the United States House Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre about their experiences at the Katyn Commission exhumations.
John H. "Jack" Van Vliet Jr was a career United States Army officer. He graduated from the United States Military Academy (U.S.M.A.) in 1937, fought in North Africa with II Corps, and was captured during the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid on February 17, 1943. While a captive of the Germans, Van Vliet Jr and fellow POW Captain Donald B. Stewart were selected to attend the Katyn Commission investigation into the Polish officers found murdered in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia. Van Vliet Jr and Stewart were U.S. Registered Code Users who sent coded messages from Oflag 64 to MIS-X in Fort Hunt New Jersey which identified the Soviets as the perpetrators of the massacre. After their liberation, they testified before the United States House Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre about their experiences at the Katyn Commission exhumations.
