Joshua Klein, Brigham Young University
History
In the last half of the 20th Century, the history of the enigmatic British intelligence community has been increasingly exposed as multiple archives have allowed access to original documents. This project involves a study of the Joint Intelligence Community, an agency created a few years before the outbreak of World War 2. The committee had the task of combining reports from the various agencies within the British Intelligence community into one cohesive report for the Chiefs of Staff and the Prime Minister. As part of a research project at Cambridge University, I acquired the primary sources (the JIC reports throughout the war) in a trip to the Kew Archive of the British National Archives in London. Because the reports represent the various agencies’ combined reports, they consequently offer a remarkable insight into the thinking of British policy makers on a week by week basis; thus, they reveal British policy makers’ information, opinions, and perceptions within the context of the war. These extraordinary sources profoundly limit historical anachronism. My discoveries reveal a plethora of inconsistencies between our contemporary understanding of British perceptions during the war and actual British perceptions during the war. Following is a brief list of these preliminary discoveries, which I hope to present at UCUR. I will discuss how these insights helps shape our contemporary understanding of British perceptions during the war.
- Surprising hesitancy to believe that Germany would attack Russia
- Over-estimation of Britain’s role in the war and a under-estimation of Russia’s role
- Relatively late recognition of Germany’s doomed fate on the Eastern Front
- Failure to recognize German potential to continue fighting as the war nears the end
- Severe British anxiety regarding German attempts for a peace agreement
- Explicit failure to identify the Nazis’ ideological motivations throughout the entire war
- Anti-Soviet tendencies throughout the war