Clive Ponting's 1940 and its Critics

It seems a common criticism of Clive Ponting's 1940: Myth and Reality that he repeats facts that everyone knows. (Even Angus Calder, whom I would have expected to be more sympathetic, also makes it in his own Myth of the Blitz, a book which has its virtues but which also surprised and disappointed me in forcefully coming out for the myth that, as he himself owns, he once sought to debunk.)

This strikes me as a matter of picking a fight where there is none, since Ponting makes no claims about bringing new facts to light. It also strikes me as unintentional confirmation of Ponting's making a well-founded case. And that it is commonplace gives the impression that people are straining to find support for a negativity coming from other places. (Calder, alas, is a literary critic doing history, and one not wholly unaffected by the fashions of his day, as he shows when in Blitz he cites "death of the author"-flogging postructuralist Roland Barthes, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the book came down on the side not of a reading of the facts, but of myth over fact. Groan.) Often they are pushing a blatant political agenda. (After all, his becoming a public figure as a Falklands War whistleblower did not exactly endear him to many opinionmakers; while then and now debunkers of myth like 1940 can only expect the hostility and contempt of the orthodox.)

Yet, that he is up against such prejudices is proof of how necessary his book has been--and perhaps, even more necessary now as the myth he criticized fills our movie screens once more, shaping the views of credulous moviegoers who get what little history they have from such content and nowhere else.