"Info: Our guest is military historian and author Antony Beevor. He discusses his newly released historical narrative, “The Second World War.” Beevor talks about the origins of the conflict spanning from before Hitler’s invasion of Poland to the aftermath of the war and its global impact on the major powers of the day. He describes Adolf Hitler’s dark and chaotic final days, including his marriage to Eva Braun and the couple’s subsequent suicide. He details the time and circumstances of the start of World War II for each of the participating countries, and he discusses actions taken by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur to suppress information at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946. He relates how he went about researching and assembling the volume of information he used to write the book. He describes his writing style and the barn he converted to a library in England to research and write the book."
""Brian Lamb: I’m trying to find the quote, of course I can’t fast enough, but there was a quote in here that people might be surprised about and that would be where you quote Teddy White, who was such a prominent figure in this country in the ’60s, when he wrote about the elections.
BEEVOR: Yes.
LAMB: Buying the Mao as a successor to Chiang Kai-shek as being a better deal.
BEEVOR: Yes. I’m afraid the war’s, say a lot of, shall we say New Deal idealism and I think that certainly more and more historians now are accepting that in fact Chiang Kai-shek has had rather a bad deal in history. He had an impossible situation. Yes, there was a lot of corruption within his own organization and all the rest of it, but when you see what Mao did later; the witch hunts of any opponent, the killings, the humiliation and destruction of almost anybody who might be slightly dubious, let alone oppose Mao’s personal command.
I mean it wasn’t a question of being anti-communist; it was a question of unless you absolutely bowed down to Mao as a – as a god you know you were regarded as an enemy. And this was madness, frankly. But it was terrifying that so many people were able to bow – buy the story which the Communists were – the Chinese Communists were putting out at the time; that they were the ones fighting the Japanese and the Nationalists were doing nothing.
This is totally untrue. Mao was very careful and was giving orders the whole time to his troops. You know don’t take on the Japanese; we need to keep our weapons and our ammunition ready to destroy the Nationalists in the civil war that will follow – inevitably, which will follow the Second World War.""
I have read two of his books: Berlin: The Downfall 1945 and Stalingrad.