Field Guide #1: War of the World
The Second World War, 1930-1945
Published on
I. Introduction
This is the first-ever Historically Thinking Field Guide. These will be a guide to a set of episodes on a topic, a historical problem, or a habit of historical thinking. In time we plan for these to be classroom companions for high school and college teachers.
For our first Field Guide, I’ve chosen the Second World War. This is a somewhat curious choice, as I haven’t done that many conversations on it. Admittedly this is because I am pig-headed and contrarian, and when I see lots of book pouring off the press on the Second World War, I look around for a really interesting monograph on the social history of south India, or something equally out of the way. Moreover there are some very good podcasts that have quite a lot to say about the Second World War; more than one, in fact. But since July we’ve had a number of conversations on the Second World War, so many as to make me a little uneasy. I thought that I might connect all of these with all the previous conversations, to have them in one place. And to see if there are any discernible threads between them.
A couple of these episodes are straight-up military history. But what’s interesting to see is that many of these conversations are about small places and “small people”, caught up in overwhelming events. Or about how those events overwhelmed those places and people.
And then there are the meta-episodes, in which we learn something from this era. Or, which is perhaps more likely, we don’t.
II. Episodes
A. How the Third Reich Was Built
Hitler’s First One Hundred Days
Guest: Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois
What it’s about: Understanding how speed of implementation, creative improvisation, and public enthusiasm (not merely fear) shaped the Hitler regime.
Listen for: How quickly everyday Germans rationalized the new order.
Originally published: January 27, 2022
Third Reich Village
Guest: Julia Boyd
What it’s about: Seeing how local life doesn’t “pause” under dictatorship—people adapt, ignore, collaborate, resist, or simply carry on.
Listen for: How ideological battles came to define the social and human terrain of a very remote Alpine village
Originally published: May 25, 2023
Saving Freud
Guest: Andrew Nagorski
What it’s about: How Sigmund Freud—one of the most famous Jews in the world—was brought out of Austria by his friends and followers after the Nazi Anschluss.
Listen for: How the man who wrote Civilization and Its Discontents, and taught the world about “id” and “ego”, could refuse to believe that Nazis would ever do him harm.
Originally published: August 29, 2022
B. World at War
1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe
Guest: Peter Fritzsche
What it’s about: Grasping the extraordinary events of the hinge year, the year when regional wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa became one enormous war
Listen for: The movements of whole populations, as refugees, internees, workers, or soldiers; the ways in which other pre-war concerns merged with the war itself
Originally published: October 1, 2025
Wolfpack
Guest: Roger Moorhouse
What it’s about: The story of the undersea war from within the German Navy’s U-boat service: how they were selected, what submarines were like, what life on them was like, and the terrible danger they faced at sea
Listen for: How Nazi was a U-boat crew? And how did Nazi Germany think of the highly-trained sailors fighting for the survival of the regime?
Originally published: October 22, 2025
Phantom Fleet
Guest: Alexander Rose
What it’s about: You want swashbuckling daring on the high seas? This is the podcast for you. Not a lot of high strategy or social history are referenced in this podcast!
Listen for: What it takes to bring a U-boat to the surface, and then board it.
Originally published: July 16, 2025
Agent Zo
Guest: Clare Mulley
What it’s about: The story of Elżbieta Zawacka—codename “Zo”—Polish patriot, soldier in the Polish Army, the only woman to parachute back into Poland to rejoin the fight against Nazi rule.
Listen for: How Zo survived not just the Nazis, but torture and imprisonment in Communist Poland; and how her act of resistance against the communists was to collect materials about the Polish Resistance during the Second World War
Originally published: December 16, 2024
The Forgers
Guest: Roger Moorhouse
What it’s about: Beginning in 1940, a group of Polish diplomats based in Bern, Switzerland, orchestrated a daring program of forging passports and identity documents from Latin American countries. These papers were then smuggled into Nazi-occupied Europe, where they became lifelines for Jews targeted for deportation and extermination.
Listen for: When fairly ordinary people decide to do what little they can rather than do nothing at all
Originally published: November 6, 2023
The Devils Will Get No Rest
Guest: James Conroy
What it’s about: In January 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill convened in Casablanca for what Churchill later called the most important Allied conference of the war. The conference yielded not only military plans but also public declarations of Allied unity and the principle of “unconditional surrender.”
Listen for: Roosevelt’s journey to Casablanca; the meeting between Roosevelt and De Gaulle, which can only be called an Epic Fail
Originally published: June 15, 2023
Eisenhower’s Guerillas
Guest: Ben Jones
What it’s about: The Jedburgh Teams were three man teams parachuted into France after D-Day to support the Resistance in tandem with the Allied invasion. Historian Ben Jones joins me to explore how these teams operated, why they mattered, their connection to the great politics of the war, and why their story continues to resonate.
Listen for: The unique characters that ended up as Jedburghs; why some teams succeeded, and why some failed
Originally published: March 13, 2023
Okinawa, the Crucible of Hell
Guest: Saul David
What it’s about: It was the most brutal battle of the war in the Pacific, matching in its hellishness anything on the Eastern Front. Saul David tells the story of how it was fought, and the cost inflicted on both Japanese and Americans.
Listen for: The straight line that Saul David draws from Okinawa to Hiroshima
Originally published: May 23, 2020
C. How We Have Remembered It
Speaking Yiddish to Chickens
Guest: Seth Stern
What it’s about: Thousands of survivors of the Holocaust emigrate to southern New Jersey and become chicken farmers. Some families fail quickly, defeated by the difficulty of farming, something they’ve never done before. Others, even those who later left farming, remembered them as their happiest years in America.
Listen for: The deep network of rural Jewish life in South Jersey that by 1945 was more than fifty years old. How Jewish immigrants of earlier periods didn’t always take stories of the Holocaust seriously.
Originally published: May 30, 2023
The Age of Hitler, and How We Will Survive It
Guest: Alec Ryrie
What it’s about: The Second World War is the biggest event in our cultural imagination; and Adolf Hitler the biggest and most evil character, against which all else must be measured. If you’re wondering what’s wrong with that, you should give the conversation a listen.
Listen for: What happens when the memory of Adolf Hitler and his unique evil no longer defines our common moral language? And what might replace it?
Originally published: October 8, 2025
War and Power
Guest: Phillips Payson O’Brien
What it’s about: Not really about the Second World War, but O’Brien is a historian of the Second World War, and the author of a ground-breaking reinterpretation of the conflict; so its history permeates this conversation
Listen for: A reflection on alliances in the Second World War; on how armed forces have to reinvent themselves and regenerate themselves in the midst of a war
Originally published: November 5, 2025
III. Epilogue
Putting all these conversations together makes one thing clear to me: the Second World War resists simplification because it contains too many human scales at once.
At one level, it is the story of conferences in Casablanca; of declarations like “unconditional surrender”; of industrial systems and amphibious invasions and atomic bombs. It is a story of strategy, alliance, and statecraft. It happens on a grand canvas. And it occurs at amazing speed.
But at another level, it is a small and intimate story. It is a collection of small and intimate stories. One is the story of villages that continue to quarrel, or of submarine crews who think of themselves as professionals first and Nazis second (or perhaps the reverse), of diplomats in Bern forging passports at night, three-man teams dropped into France hoping that London will receive their radio calls. It is the story of Freud, unable to imagine that the Nazis would do him harm. And it is the story of Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe finding themselves trying to raise chickens in a part of New Jersey that no one realizes exists, certain not people from North Jersey.
The war was global, but it was lived locally.
These episodes also reveal how much of the war’s meaning is constructed afterward, so that it seems inevitable, when it was always contingent. “Unconditional surrender” sounds inevitable in hindsight; in January 1943 it was a gamble. The line from Okinawa to Hiroshima looks straight only because we know where it ends. And the moral vocabulary of “Hitler” remains so powerful that we struggle to imagine politics without invoking him.
Let me suggest that what emerges from this Field Guide is not a single argument but a habit of historical thinking: resist inevitability. Resist the idea that events moved along a single track toward a foregone conclusion. Notice improvisation. Notice hesitation. Notice the stubborn persistence of ordinary life under extraordinary pressure.
And finally, notice memory itself, and how it differs from history. Did the war really end in 1945? Well, sort of. But it continues to shape how we argue, how we compare, how we condemn, how we justify. The Second World War is not simply an event but a lens; or, really, many lenses in a very large telescope.
IV. Questions for Reflection and Discussion
When did the Second World War begin? When did it end? Was it part of one long conflict, including the First World War and the Cold War?
How did speed and improvisation contribute to the consolidation of Nazi power?
In Third Reich Village and Speaking Yiddish to Chickens, how does local life persist during and after catastrophe? What changes—and what does not?
Freud could not believe he was in danger. Why do intelligent people underestimate ideological threats? Is denial a personal flaw, or a social phenomenon?
In 1942 and at Casablanca, when did Allied leaders know they were fighting a global war rather than parallel conflicts? How does declaring “unconditional surrender” reshape a war’s trajectory?
Can professional identity coexist with extremist ideology, as in the U-Boat serivce, or does one inevitably reshape the other?
Compare the Jedburgh teams, Agent Zo, and the Bern forgers. What makes resistance effective? What makes it morally meaningful? Are those the same thing?
In Okinawa, how does the brutality of the battlefield alter strategic calculation? Does Saul David’s line from Okinawa to Hiroshima feel persuasive—or too neat?
What role do exile governments and diplomatic improvisation play in shaping wartime outcomes? How fragile is legitimacy when it exists without territory?
How does the Second World War function in our political imagination today? What are the dangers of treating it as our primary moral analogy?
When you move between global strategy, institutional culture, and individual lives, which level of analysis feels most explanatory? Which feels most honest?
What are some lessons of the Second World War that we haven’t learned? Ones that we overemphasize?
V. For Teachers
This expanded Field Guide lends itself to thematic teaching rather than chronological coverage. Instructors might assign one cluster—regime-building, global war, or memory—and ask students to trace how scale shapes interpretation. Where does contingency appear? At what moments did events feel open rather than predetermined?
A comparative approach works particularly well. Pair different episodes together, and ask students how power operates differently at the levels of conference table, submarine, village, and farm. What does “agency” mean in each context?
Finally, invite students to reflect on their own moral vocabulary. Do they instinctively frame contemporary politics through the lens of the Second World War? What is gained by that analogy—and what is lost?
The aim is not simply to understand the war, but to cultivate habits of attention: sensitivity to scale, resistance to inevitability, awareness of memory’s distortions, and the discipline to see human beings inside vast events.