Anthony Beevor. La Seconde Guerre mondiale 2012

Bonjour à tous,

Je viens de suivre sur Télé Matin, la présentation rapide d'un ouvrage de l'historien militaire britannique Anthony Beevor : "La Seconde Guerre mondiale".

Cette traduction française ferait suite à une vente atteignant déjà 5 millions d'exemplaires (sic), principalement dans les pays anglo-saxons.

La présentation rapide m'a donné l'impression d'une vision très britannico-britannique avec le rôle prédominant de Joukov, tant du côté de l'affrontement russo-nippon que du côté de l'affrontement germano-russe...

Certains d'entre vous ont-il déjà lu cet ouvrage dans sa version en langue anglaise ? Que faut-il en penser ?

Cordialement,

Thierry Moné

Suite...

On trouve plus de renseignements sur le Net, par exemple sur le site du Telegraph :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/9314963/The-Second-World-War-by-Antony-Beevor-review.html

où l'on peut lire en plus détaillé ce qui a été présenté ce matin en version française, voir ce court extrait de la critique du Telegraph :

"As is now standard scholarship, Beevor stresses how much it was a world war. Hitler’s expansionist ambitions mirrored those of the Japanese on the other side of the globe. The scale and reach of the forces unleashed were personified in the fate of a young Korean with whose story Beevor begins his book, in what proves to be a rare example of his usual method. Yang Kyoungjong was conscripted by the Japanese in 1938 and sent to fight in China. There he was captured by the Soviets and drafted into the Red Army. He was taken prisoner by the Germans and then found himself serving in their ranks in Normandy. After a spell in a British POW camp, he emigrated to the United States.

But it is debatable to what extent events in Asia influenced those in Europe while peace held there. Beevor makes a case for Russia’s defeat of Japan in 1939 on the Mongolian frontier as marking the start of the conflict. That may be stretching his point that it was global. None the less, the wars in the East and the West were to become intertwined, and his inclusion of that which embroiled vast numbers of Japanese troops in China until 1945 – the Second Sino-Japanese War – corrects a long-standing blind spot in the British view of the fighting in the Orient.

Twenty million died in China, casualties comparable with those suffered by the USSR. It is unfamiliar details such as these that hold the attention. The German hatred of guerrillas is traced back to the Prussian fear of French irregulars, the francs-tireurs. Two thousand pedestrians were killed in London in the first four months of the blackout. Ten per cent of Allied soldiers in Italy were incapacitated by venereal disease. "

Cordialement,

Thierry Moné