Antony Beevor's Blog, page 5

Tuesday 25 June

The history of the war is always with us. Sergei Shoygu, the Russian minister of defence, has been provoked into outrage by Leonid Grossman, a liberal deputy in the Duma, who compared the soviet counter-intelligence department SMERSh to the SS. I was not entirely surprised to hear this. In 2009, when Minister for Emergency Situations, Shoygu called for a law to imprison anyone who criticised the Red Army. He described attacks on the Red Army as the equivalent of ‘Holocaust denial’. That was a bit rich since Stalin was the biggest Holocaust denier of all, albeit in a slightly different way. Stalin refused to acknowledge that the Jews constituted a specific category of suffering. The Party slogan then was ‘Do not divide the dead’. All Jews who died were to be categorised entirely by nationality and not in racial or religious terms.

In any case, Shoygu, who is the longest serving minister in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has taken up the Red Army banner again. Although a civil engineer by training, Shoygu is also a General of the Army and has been made a Hero of the Russian Federation. I notice that in one photograph of him in uniform he even wears the large gold star of a Marshal. In any case, Shoygu again wants a law to be passed by the Duma imposing harsh penalties on critics of the Red Army in the Second World War. This time, it might well go through.

Wednesday 12 June

Last day, yippeee! Slight panic in the morning when my pull requests were denied, but another of the archivists went charging off and fetched the right ones for me from the stacks.  I had a chance to thank the senior archivist for all his help and advice before I left. His emphasis on the observers’ reports had made all the difference. I could have missed out gravely if I had not put them at the top of my list. I drove the hire car to Baltimore international, where the great American travel machine worked like clockwork: stopping the car in a queue, handing over the keys, taking the roller suitcase, boarding the shuttle bus to the terminal, through security and into the airline lounge. The day will come when you can do the whole thing with your eyes closed.

Tuesday 11 June

Second last day. Once again I started the morning by driving all the way to Starbucks as it seems to be the only place for miles around where one can get a decent cup of coffee which actually gives you a hit. And I had been so sniffy about Starbucks back in London, perhaps because in Fulham it seems to be inhabited by young men tapping at their I-pads, and by young mothers, encumbered with strollers and pushchairs, and bored by babyhood, .

Monday 10 June

Only three days left, so a fever of work, counterpointed by a longing to be out of here and home. I must not allow the joyful prospect to distract me. And I really should keep focused on my pre-emptive pessimism, especially since I am rather excited about the quality of material I have found in these archives, with a growing determination that with this book I will not merely be leaving the Second World War on a high, but that it will be my best one of all.  In the afternoon, my heart sank when over the public address system in the archives they announced a tornado alert and told us that if the warning came through we would all have to go down the basement. Just what I needed. But in the event we were left to continue working undisturbed. My archivist friend dropped by to see how I was doing. My grin of satisfaction over the observer reports he had recommended certainly pleased him.

I went for a swim back at the hotel to do my twenty lengths, and I could not help wondering what would happen if a tornado sucked all the water and me out of the pool. It reminded me of those urban legends about scuba divers being scooped up by Canadair fire-fighting planes and dropped on a forest blaze.

Sunday 9 June

My one day off as the National Archives are closed. (I was amazed the ones in Carlisle operated on a seven-day week). I found an organic foodstore a couple of miles south on US1 and loaded up with supposedly healthy goodies, then spent the day swimming and reading. But just as I was starting to write this, my computer announbced that it had recovered the material I thought I had lost. The prodigal combat observer had returned!

I always thought that Hollywood went way over the top when a dozen police cars turn up at the crime scene in a movie, but now I am not so sure. This afternoon a woman was knocked down by a pick-up truck. She was clearly not too badly hurt, as she was sitting up talking to fellow-workers at the hotel. But then no less than three police cars, a fire engine and an ambulance all turned up. I suppose it is reassuring that the emergency services are underemployed here in College Park. While on the subject, I have often wondered if Hollywood gets a special deal on white cars for all the police vehicles rolled, blown-up and smashed during filming. I cannot imagine ever seeing a tag-line in a movie which states ‘no police cars were hurt during the making of this film.’

Saturday 8 June

I stopped at the entrance to the archives to check with the security guard whether the cafeteria was open that day. (Although they are all armed, I love the southern sing-song accent of the black ladies who work here). On discovering from her that it was closed on Saturdays, I ‘hung a U’ as she advised and went to the Metzerott Plaza down the road, where I found a Hispanic supermarket. They had bananas, stoneground bread and avocados, so that was my diet for the day. I seem to have lost almost all the work I did the day before. That combined with my inability to get any e-mails, left me rather depressed. I had to go back and photograph every page I had covered.

Friday 7 June

The wonderful material in the combat observer series of reports will take up most of my time, but it is so wide-ranging and rich in detail that I feel I can dispense with almost everything else.

American food is almost more filthy than I remember. Just down the road from my hotel was a large dark place called Sakamura Seafood. I thought I would give it a try. There were a couple of girls standing outside who were so vast that I am amazed they could move. Fascinated and appalled, I ventured in past a sign saying ‘as much as you can eat for $12′. You queued, paid your money to the dismissive and bossy little Japanese girls at the till, (I could hardly blame them for their attitude), and then you piled your plates, wandering from row to row in the vast dark hall, which could have been a Chinese Communist Party canteen. Well, I tried just a few things: some calamari, small fried fish and little crabs. They could have tasted worse, but the whole atmosphere of joyless greed depressed me so much, that I hurried back to my hotel to read.

Thursday 6 June

I drove down to Washington DC in the morning. On the way I passed Messiah College, I kid you not, which offers courses in Christian counselling. It seems to be  a boom industry to judge by the ads on the radio. I checked in to the Ramada College Park, a grimmer place than I had realised and the room smelled of unwashed feet. There was no time to change hotels, so I set off for the archive. One of the senior archivists who had helped me before came out to greet me with a ‘Happy D-Day’. I had entirely forgotten the date. He wasted no time in getting me set up with a list of documents and advised me strongly to focus on the ‘combat observer reports’ for the Ardennes battles and the whole of the western front.

Wednesday 5 June

My last day in USAMHI. Thanks to the camera, I have covered far more ground than I ever imagined, albeit with weeks of work still to go at home going through the photos and transcribing the results. I had a long chat on the telephone with a great friend who has helped me so much here. We spoke mainly about the situation in Europe, where democracy is under serious threat, but also how depressed she is about the United States, and the domination of corporate culture in politics. American democracy has quite simply been sold down the river.

Monday 3 June

I manage to cover a lot of ground by photgraphing hundreds of pages with the little digital camera fixed to one of the archive’s stands. I pray that they work. There is such good stuff in the Hansen and other diaries that I think I will have quite  a lot of fun writing about the squabbles of high command. I will also go back over the Forrest Pogue notes on all his interviews for his official history The Supreme Command. Characters like Bill Williams, Monty’s chief intelligence officer, were breathtakingly outspoken. Mass copying of the Foreign Military Study series of papers written by German commanders for the Americans and the ETHINT papers - European Theater Interrogations – mean that I must buy more memory chips at this rate.