Official history of the British contribution to the Second World War
This article is about the official history published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. For a timeline of the history of World War II, see Timeline of World War II.
Not to be confused with Purnell's History of the Second World War, published in 1966 with the co-operation of the Imperial War Museum.
The History of the Second World War is the official history of the British contribution to the Second World War and was published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO). The immense project was sub-divided into areas to ease publication, United Kingdom Military Series, the United Kingdom Civil Series for the civilian war effort; the Foreign Policy series, the Intelligence series and the Medical series are eponymous. Other volumes not under the aegis of the series but published by HMSO may be read as adjuncts, covering matters not considered in great detail or at all, in one case, in the main series. Further volumes, published after the privatisation of HMSO or in the series about the Special Operations Executive, are also useful.
The volumes were intended to be read individually, rather than in series, which led to some overlapping. In their introductions to their parts of the series, Sir Keith Hancock and Sir James Butler wrote that this was to obviate a need to read more volumes than those covering that part of the war effort. Hancock edited the Civil Series and Butler the Military Series. The first volume appeared in 1949 and the last in 1993, with a revised edition of one volume appearing in 2004. An unorthodox decision was to cover the conflict from a theatre of operations point of view rather than by service, to acknowledge that military operations were intimately linked.
The works published before 1970 lack references to unpublished sources until government archives were opened, to an extent, by the Public Records Act 1958 and the Public Records Act 1967. The works were published with only references to published sources because British constitutional conventions on the anonymity of government officials and ministers were followed, leading to a somewhat detached narrative style in some cases. A parallel series of volumes for official use were printed, which referenced the unpublished sources in manuscript, in red ink[citation needed]. A few official copies 'escaped' into public libraries and these additions can be seen.[citation needed]
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