‘You can’t include too much horror’ says war author Antony Beevor

You would expect someone of Antony Beevor’s calibre; the award-winning, world-renowned military historian, whose books continually grace the best-seller lists, to be an Oxbridge graduate who excelled at history and the world of academia.

After all, his father and grandfather both went to New College and his daughter completed her PhD at Oxford. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Beevor describes himself as a failed A-Level student who went to Sandhurst, joined the 11th Hussars and only started writing because he was sent to such a boring outpost in Wales he had to do something.

Moving quickly on to military history, he started with the liberation of Paris, progressing on to Crete, and the Spanish Civil War, before embarking on his best known novels about WW2.

And yet the scope and breadth of his books take your breath away, his current offering – Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble – bringing to life yet another Second World War backdrop with such luminosity and insight that the ‘military history’ category dissolves under his narrative.

I devour his books as soon as the ink has dried on the page, but Beevor’s gift is not only presenting the bigger picture in a comprehensive, exciting, chronological format, but he understands that a combination of official history and eye witness accounts are essential in bringing these heroic, historic and desperate struggles to life, whether on the banks of the Volga in Stalingrad, the defeated city of Berlin, the beaches of D-Day or, most recently, Belgium.

The 68 year-old is disparaging about vanity projects, dusty history tomes written by academics determined to prove their own theories, or biased theses.

Had he gone to Oxford however, and been taught a methodology, maybe his books would be equally as biased. “Perhaps, who knows. But I also had Perthes Disease (a rare childhood condition that affects the hip) and was on crutches for a long time at school, so I think going into the military was about proving myself physically as well. But yes, I was in revolt,” he accedes.

As a military historian however, a stint in the army must have put Antony in good stead? “Yes, it did help me to understand the psychology of the military.”

However, after finishing Berlin – The Downfall 1945, Beevor had a breakdown of sorts, a result of deadlines and an inability to process what he uncovered in Moscow’s vaults. Having been given access to the Red Army’s archives in 1995, which have since been hastily closed, his Russian translator Luba often wept over the material discovered, much of it making its way into Beevor’s books on Stalingrad and Berlin.

“You have to be very careful how much horror you can put in a book,” he reflects, “how much people can cope with. The Russian orphans living on berries and crusts stayed with me long after the book was published, but then the civilians always suffer most because emotions can change and people are volatile, never more so than in war, so alongside evidence of great humanity there is always terrible cruelty as well. For example when the Red Army reached Berlin it was often the Russian Jewish soldiers who stopped the rape of the local German women. You always come across the unexpected.”

As a result, if Beevor steps on to Russian soil today he has been informed he would be jailed for up to five years because any criticism of the Red Army during the war is now an imprisonable offence.

“Russia sees the liberation of Berlin as sacred,” he shrugs. “They didn’t want to know about the brutality or the mass rapes. I was even accused of falling for Goebbels’ propaganda. So I won’t be going on holiday there any time soon.”

So is it hard to remain impartial? “You shouldn’t react emotionally as a military historian, and I like to think I’m pretty balanced. I may be relieved when the Allies behave well, but the duty of a historian is to be as accurate and objective as you can.”

Antony Beevor

And what of Beevor the husband and father (he is married to the writer Artemis Cooper and has two children), is he impossible to live with and permanently preoccupied? “I don’t think so. There is a family joke that I grind my teeth when watching bad or inaccurate historical films but apart from that I think I’m all right. That one with Tom Cruise, Valkyrie, was so ghastly,” he shudders. “Even the Ardennes was made into a dismal movie (Battle of the Bulge) in the 1960s with Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw and Telly Savalas.”

So what’s the answer then to bringing military history to life? “You have to go right back to the beginning and apply a certain chronology. You have to make the narrative work chapter by chapter. It should be a pleasure to read, not like German military histories when you need to wrap a damp towel round your head because it’s so dense and dull. Utterly unreadable. Giving it a narrative is a British thing.”

Beevor says his next book on Arnhem might be his last, with each book taking up to five years to complete. After that he might go back to writing novels. “Arnhem wasn’t just a heroic failure but an absolute disaster,” he says. “The Dutch suffered enormously, but as they were all told to keep diaries, we have material to keep us going for decades.”

So has he already started it? “I can’t chew gum and run at the same time,” he tells me, “but when I do, I will write the skeleton chapters and then add the research as I go along, so that it has a structure, which helps me psychologically. Finding a rhythm and voice is the most important thing, after that everything else follows.”

“People always ask me actually who I write for, whether my work is altruistic, but I write what I want to write about. I write for myself and if I didn’t write I think I’d lose my marbles.”

Antony Beevor is visiting Jaffe & Neale in Chipping Norton on Friday, June 26, to discuss Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble. Tickets from jaffeandneale.co.uk