Purnell's History of the Second World War was a hugely successful weekly anthology or 'partwork' publication covering all aspects of World War II that was distributed throughout the English-speaking world. Produced shortly before the similarly accomplished 8-volume series on WW1, it was first published in 1966, being reprinted several times during the 1970s. [1]
The magazine was notable for its use of multiple writers – many of them well-known military figures – from all relevant nationalities in order to present a rounded view of the subject material. This was combined with high-quality original artwork of the military hardware used, maps and numerous previously 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 now 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 would both hold up to academic scrutiny and be accessible to the general public. Each issue of the magazine contained several 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) in order to allow the writers to counter long held myths and set the record straight rather than to merely 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 surviving protagonists were still 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 Alan Clark MP and the best-selling author Dudley Pope. Eyewitness 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 1163 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 their own opinion. His article was followed by a piece by a Soviet scientist purporting to be a forensic re-examination of all the available evidence such as the conditions of the bodies, their levels of decomposition and the remaining artefacts in order to 'prove' that the Polish officers could have only been murdered during the period of the German occupation of the region. Using eye 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 breakup of the European empires in the years after World War II. 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.
As well as the magazine itself, a series of higher quality 'specials' were also later produced which were themselves hugely successful, selling over 8 million copies world wide. [4] They centred on specific elements not only of World War II but also World War I, 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 previously 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 remain sought after on internet auctions.
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Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski was a Polish military and political leader.
The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile, was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Poland of September 1939, and the subsequent occupation of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, which brought to an end the Second Polish Republic.
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 the largest print groups in the UK and at one time a major publisher.
Katyn war cemetery is a Polish military cemetery located in Katyn, a small village 22 kilometres away from Smolensk, Russia, on the road to Vitebsk. It contains the remnants of 4,412 Polish officers of the Kozelsk prisoner of war camp, who were murdered in 1940 in what is called the Katyn massacre. Except for bodies of two Polish generals exhumed by German authorities in 1943 and then buried separately, all Polish officers murdered in Katyn were buried in six large mass graves. There is also a Russian part of the cemetery, where some 6,500 victims of the Soviet Great Purges of the 1930s were buried by the NKVD. The cemetery was officially opened in 2000.
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 (Podlasie) 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 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces.
Alexander Werth was a Russian-born, naturalized British writer, journalist, and war correspondent.
The Polish Armed Forces in the East, also called Polish Army in the USSR, were the Polish military forces established in the Soviet Union during World War II.
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.
Katyń is a 2007 Polish historical drama film about the 1940 Katyn massacre, directed by Academy Honorary Award winner Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the book Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn by Andrzej Mularczyk. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 80th Academy Awards.
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.
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.
Grover Carr Furr III is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 was not a deliberate famine or Holodomor, that the Katyn massacre was committed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel and not the Soviet NKVD, that all defendants in the Moscow Trials were guilty of what they had been charged with, that claims in Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech" are almost entirely false, that the purpose of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was to preserve the Second Polish Republic rather than partition it, and that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland in September 1939, on the grounds that the Polish state no longer existed. Furr claims that the mainstream narrative of the Soviet Union and in particular the Stalin era is biased and that many of the claims of mainstream historians are unfounded, and uses the term "anti-Stalin paradigm" to describe this narrative.
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.
The Palmiry massacre was a series of mass executions carried out by Nazi German forces, during World War II, near the village of Palmiry in the Kampinos Forest northwest of Warsaw.
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.
