Oliver Kamm: David Irving on the Pacific War
[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He was previously an investment banker and co-founder of an asset management firm.]
I'm deliberately not providing a link for the article that I'm criticising in this post. The reason is that the article is by David Irving, who a court of law has determined is a Holocaust denier. But you can take my word for it that the material I'm referring to can be found on Irving's website.
I've recently written about Irving's notorious inflation of the number of victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden. I wasn't familiar, however, with Irving's techniques in writing about the Pacific War, in which the Allies defeated another racist power, Imperial Japan. I was thus interested to read an article that Irving has recently posted on his website but that he wrote in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima....
I've dealt with this claim of revisionist historians - and also of the fraudulent ignoramus Howard Zinn, who wasn't a historian at all - many times and won't do so here. It's bogus. The shock of the A-bomb - Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima - was crucial for the 'peace party' in Japan's Cabinet to prevail. My interest here is not in Irving's argument, on which he's out of his depth, as in his supporting material. For he prefaces his article with a disturbing photograph. It shows mounds of corpses against a bleak and devastated landscape. And the souce is cited as the Robert L. Capp Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives....
The photograph that Irving illustrates his Hiroshima article with is one of that series. It isn't of Hiroshima at all: it's of the 1923 earthquake. Moreover, the American historian who found the photographs in the Hoover Institution archive, Sean Malloy, acknowledges that he was mistaken....
My view of David Irving has long been that he has an extensive knowledge of primary and secondary historical sources and is a capable linguist. It's what he does with the source materials that is objectionable and an offence against historical truth. But this episode causes me to change my opinion. Irving is not only a racist faker: the man's a bluffer.
Read entire article at Times Online (UK)
I'm deliberately not providing a link for the article that I'm criticising in this post. The reason is that the article is by David Irving, who a court of law has determined is a Holocaust denier. But you can take my word for it that the material I'm referring to can be found on Irving's website.
I've recently written about Irving's notorious inflation of the number of victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden. I wasn't familiar, however, with Irving's techniques in writing about the Pacific War, in which the Allies defeated another racist power, Imperial Japan. I was thus interested to read an article that Irving has recently posted on his website but that he wrote in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima....
I've dealt with this claim of revisionist historians - and also of the fraudulent ignoramus Howard Zinn, who wasn't a historian at all - many times and won't do so here. It's bogus. The shock of the A-bomb - Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima - was crucial for the 'peace party' in Japan's Cabinet to prevail. My interest here is not in Irving's argument, on which he's out of his depth, as in his supporting material. For he prefaces his article with a disturbing photograph. It shows mounds of corpses against a bleak and devastated landscape. And the souce is cited as the Robert L. Capp Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives....
The photograph that Irving illustrates his Hiroshima article with is one of that series. It isn't of Hiroshima at all: it's of the 1923 earthquake. Moreover, the American historian who found the photographs in the Hoover Institution archive, Sean Malloy, acknowledges that he was mistaken....
My view of David Irving has long been that he has an extensive knowledge of primary and secondary historical sources and is a capable linguist. It's what he does with the source materials that is objectionable and an offence against historical truth. But this episode causes me to change my opinion. Irving is not only a racist faker: the man's a bluffer.