Interview with historian Richard Overy, author of “Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan”

Richard Overy is one of the premier historians of the Second World War and the Third Reich. He earned his PhD at Cambridge and has written over twenty-five books, many which have changed our understanding of the Second World War, like The Air War (1980) and The Bombing War (2013). In 2024, he published Why War? which looked at the history and origins of war broadly. His 2025 book is Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan.

How did you become interested in the subject of history?

Well, that's a difficult one because it's a long time ago. I mean, if I'm honest, my mother was very interested in history. She had a lot of books on the shelves and I picked them up when I was very young and was very soon fascinated. I think from quite early on, it was a major interest, that and archaeology in competition. But history won out.

Nice. What led you to become an academic and somebody who actually works in history? Because I think, you know, a lot of people are interested in history at some stage, but they don't do anything with it professionally.

No, I mean when I got to University of Cambridge to read history, I didn't quite know what to expect. I didn't know what the outcome would be, if I'd be very good at it or not. And I got the results I needed and I just wanted to go on, you know, carry on doing history, as what I most enjoyed. And you know, as long as I was able to do it to a sufficient academic standard, there was nothing to prevent me from doing it. So I went on to do a Ph. D. and then to become a history lecturer. It looks immaculate it looks like a charmed path, as if it was inevitable. But it wasn't inevitable. It required, you know, thinking and wondering and hope rather than expectation.

And a lot of work.

Oh, a lot of work, yeah.

Your 2024 book is titled Why War? But I want to ask you that question, I guess generally about your interests. What is it about war that has especially drawn you to study it? And why that subject more than others?

Well, I've been asked that question quite often because I think the assumption most people have is that I must have served in the armed forces. There's quite a lot of military historians have served in the armed forces. Of course, I haven't and have no desire to be in the armed forces.

What drew me to war, it was partly accidental when I was looking for a subject for my doctorate. I want to do something on the Third Reich. And at the time, very little was actually written from archival sources about Germany’s warfare. So I chose a subject from that. And out of that grew my interest in in warfare and air war, particularly in the Second World War, because above all the wars of the recent past it's the one that raises the most questions. You know it's the largest in scale. It's the most global. It's the most deadly. And it seemed to me that here was an opportunity to explore very large questions and try to find answers to them. And I think that, you know, really was what attracted me to the idea of doing more. I'm not fascinated by war or warfare. Much of it repels me, but I'm fascinated by the challenges that the history of the war presents to an historian.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think that that also speaks, I think, kind of to my next question a little bit, which is, does war reveal to us maybe more about human nature or human society than other topics?

Well, war can tell you a lot of things. Old-fashioned military history, this kind of military history that was around when I was first starting out, it was basically about moving divisions around and armies around on a map and so on. And you know, they would have a battle and one side would win and one side would lose. And that's why there's quite a strong prejudice against military history in academic circles. It's assumed that it's the kind of thing that ex-soldiers can write about. Because it's about battles and weapons.

A typical view of military history is very limited, but, in fact, the history of war, history of the Second World War, is not limited at all. I mean it covers a whole range of human activities. And it raises all kinds of questions about human nature, about how people behave under extreme stress, what the consequences of wartime trauma might be. And so, you are forced to examine really quite large human issues. It's not just a question of moving troops around on a map. Or even moving troops around on a map means you've got to know something about the troops, what motivates them, how they keep going emotionally, and so on.

Now since I started the history of war, that is the way in which it's developed. It's grown enormously away from straightforward military history to the history of whole societies at war and what it actually does to whole societies, how people cope with the demands of war, whether you're a soldier, whether you're a civilian being bombed. Why is it that in the Second World War, above all, you have overwhelming examples of human evil? What is it that drives people to perform that kind of wickedness under the protection, if you like, of wartime circumstances? These are very big and very awkward questions and to which we don't indeed have precise answers.

I know your recent book, Why War? integrates scholarship from a lot of different fields, so not just history, but anthropology and psychology. Was that enjoyable to do, to draw from all those other fields? Was it really difficult or was it research that you were already doing and then this let you kind of bring it all together in a book?

No, it was very enjoyable and I hadn't done it before. Historians are terribly aloof actually from other disciplines. They often don't bother to look at what social scientists are saying. They certainly wouldn't look at what most natural scientists are saying. And I mean, I've always regarded that as something of a mistake. And it is a mistake. I mean, I learnt a huge amount by delving into the way in which other disciplines address the questions normally addressed by historians. And in fact, you know, for all that, historians don't theorize about war very much at all. Whereas social scientists, political scientists, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, they do have very important and significant things to say about war, which are not necessarily historical. But they do explain a great deal about human motives and human behaviour.

So I learned a huge amount and enjoyed doing it very much. I had to get a bit of help from some of the people who are experts in the field. But actually being an historian trains you to read other people's work and to think about it critically, so that that in itself is not very difficult. But it was for me a novelty. And I'm doing it again. In fact, with my new book, I’m going to start exploring other disciplines and not relying any longer just on history.

I really enjoyed that one [Why War?]. I read it this past year and then I used it in one of the classes that I teach. We read excerpts of it and I think it was helpful. That was a historical methods class, so getting students to think about how history operates as a discipline and kind of the big picture questions and how other disciplines approach things, I found it really helpful.

Well, other disciplines approach with a very different set of assumptions. So social scientists, for example, are very reluctant, normally, to talk about theories of war. Indeed, quite reluctant to talk about war. They actually prefer to think about societies moving towards a situation where we operate as a community where, you know, we are socially effective. Anthropologists for a long time stopped or didn't want talk about war or certainly not think about how war evolved historically. But in the last 20-30 years, you know, anthropologists have had to adopt an historical approach, have had to accept that war is a reality. And it’s a reality that goes back thousands of years. They've had to start integrating theory into the more general theories they have about human development. It's a two-way process. In other words, it's not just that we are borrowing from them. Other disciplines are having to think historically, as well.

AJP Taylor said famously of your book The Air War, that it was “highly effective in the ruthless dispelling of myths.” Is that part of how you see your work overall? Is that consciously part of your approach or is it just a byproduct of the work that you've done?

Not as conscious effort. I mean, just all historians ought to be doing that. They ought to be thinking critically about the way in which we construct the past. And, you know, say, well, that doesn't work. It's what everybody believes, but, actually, if we look at the historical record and look at the archives, it's not what it tells us. And you know, it's very important historians do that. I think the rather sobering fact is that even though you spend time well, demolishing this… That's not the right way of putting it. You know, changing the way in which we view the past, there is often very strong reluctance.

With that book, Air War, I touched on the issue about the Battle of Britain where, you know, we've always had the Battle of Britain, as you know, the German Goliath and the British David. But in fact, it was the other way around. The German Air Force was not very well equipped for the battle. It didn't quite know what it was doing. The British fighter force was larger than the German fighter force, Britain produced a great many more fighters and fighter pilots and airplanes and pilots in general than the Germans did. And I found that people strongly resisted that view, they liked the idea of Little England defeating big Germany. And indeed, that's still, I think, probably for many people, the prevailing myth. So, you know, it's what I like to do. It’s what historians ought to do, but I think we need to realize the limits to what we do when we think about the wider public.

Old views seem to persist in many cases. Kind of no matter what gets written.

Indeed. Well, my book Rain of Ruin, the latest book, is about Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the surrender of Japan. And the most enduring popular image there is that the two atomic bombs caused Japanese to surrender. And if you carried out a poll on the street, you know, that's the view you would get. In fact, most of the recent literature of the last 10-15 years has modified that view. Indeed, overturned it almost entirely.
It's not the two atomic bomb that caused Japanese surrender, it's a much more complicated story than that, to which the two atomic bombs contributed, but contributed much less than the popular image suggests. So that's a new one I'm working on. But whether it'll actually have any effect on American opinion, I don't know.

I was just about to ask you about that book. So much of your focus on the Second World War has been on the West and on Europe. What? What drew you to that topic? And anything about now in particular or just you've been wanting to get to it?

There is a now in particular, of course. Now Asia has become a very much more significant part of the global story and China is now superpower and it has forced historians the West to think rethink much of what they wrote about Asia over the last century or so. Because the assumption always is, you know we're working towards the Cold War, we're working towards American and Soviet Union superpowers and so on, and China is, you know, over there. And I think that that has affected the way historians start thinking about the history of the middle 20th, middle 20th century. Certainly affected me, I think.

But for a long time, I've always wanted to integrate the Asian war with the European war. I think that for a long time, historians have made an unnatural division between the two. It is a global war. And the war between China and Japan is a big war, not a little war. It's a big war which is often overlooked or stuck in one chapter in the book. And when I finally came to writing my big history of the Second World War, I wanted to make sure I didn't do that, you know, so that I can put it into proper perspective. And that's the way most historians who work on the Second World War are thinking. It's certainly the case in China where my book has just been translated and has proved very popular, apparently. But it's very popular because I'm a Western historian who starts off my account with what the Japanese are doing in China and for them that's a complete novelty. Western historians don’t do that much.
They start off with Hitler and Munich and so on. And so I’m spending quite a lot of time discussing these questions now with historians and other journalists in Asia.

But it has to be done. The 1930s was a violent decade, not just the 1940s, and it was violent because of what the Japanese were doing, as well as what the Italians and the Germans were doing. And the war the Japanese fought with the Chinese was a long and deadly war, much longer than the Second World War, and needs to be given its proper place in the historical narrative.

Another question I have is, you already mentioned the atomic bombs—people may see them as playing a role that they didn't quite fully play, but also it seems like that is a topic which prompts a lot of moral reflection and moral judgment by later generations much more so than other Allied events of the war. Is that reasonable, or is that surprising to you? Is that unsurprising to you? How should we feel about the fact that so many people, they feel the need to have some kind of moral judgment about the atomic bombs? But not necessarily about anything else.

Well, I mean, it's clearly been an issue since 1945 itself and it's an issue to which people return again and again, and one to which historians return to again and again. It does prompt moral judgments and the moral judgments fall both ways, of course. On the whole, opinion polls in America still show that the majority, slight majority, of people think that it was legitimate to drop the atomic bombs. And the other half think, of course, that it wasn't. So people do arrive at moral judgments on this issue, and we don't arrive on moral judgments about much else.

The bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which I deal with my book, which resulted in the death of more than 83,000 people in horrible conditions, was the worst bombing raid of the war and either most people have not heard of it or if they have heard of it, they don't really pay it the attention which perhaps it deserves. The same is true in the European war. We all talk about Dresden because Dresden attracted a lot of attention at the time. But the other major bombing raids, the raid on Hamburg which killed over 3,000 people, the worst raid in Europe… Again, most people have not heard of it, or if they have heard of it, you know, we don't agonize about it, you know, “shouldn't have done that.” Whereas on the atomic bombs, people do.

A lot of historians, of course, and I've been very careful I think with this in my book, is that it's very easy for historians to get on their moral high horses. They were a terrible thing. How awful Americans are. And so on and so on. I don't think that helps us at all. I've tried in my book to do the opposite. Put yourself in the position of what was happening in 1945 in order to be able to explain why it happened. I regret that it happened and of course a great many people do. We wish the atomic bomb had not been dropped. But we need to understand why it was dropped, and understanding why it was dropped may well help us to reconsider what it is that we're doing today,
to avoid the radicalisation of strategy which makes these things possible. It's a very difficult thing to do and we can see in current wars in 21st century, strategy very soon gets radicalised. People start off doing, you know, regular military things and they, you know, end up killing civilians.

Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting to me with the atomic bombs is how often in America, especially, the ”it was a good thing to drop it” or “it was a bad thing to drop it”--there's no complexity at all in either of those positions. And if you say, well, you know, these are the things that are being presented to Truman. Truman didn't even know about the atomic bomb two years before that. You know, it's all fresh and everything is live and people say like, no, no, there's no excuse. On the other side, you say, well, you know, there's this and there's that. And say no, there's no reason not to. Not a lot of people are willing to think that it was a complicated decision at the time, as well. And not just automatically should have gone one way or the other in a way that was obvious to people then.

No. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, looking at material on the American side, what American and British—of course there were lots of British scientists involved in producing the bomb, too, a point I've made in the book actually. Britain always gets ironed out of narratives about the bomb and, you know, British scientists, shared some of the responsibility, as well. But it was a complicated decision.

But I think the evidence shows that there was never really going to be a point when it was not going to be used. But the problem really was, would it be ready? And the scientists were driven to try and produce a bomb so they could see if they could produce the first ever bomb. And they would be able to see what it did. And I've emphasized in the book how important is to understand that these were scientists who really spent little time thinking about the moral implications of what they were doing, knowing perfectly well that a bomb would destroy a vast area and kill all the people in it. And nevertheless, they were scientifically so curious, desperate to get the bomb ready. So once the bomb was ready, there was never really going to be a question as to, it wasn't going to be used. The military, the Air Force commanders and so on wanted to use it. They wanted to, you know, intensify the air campaign against Japan. Truman thought it might even end the war, but actually quite a lot of people around him didn't think that. But he had no reason to prevent it from being dropped. General Marshall, Commander in Chief of the Army, had no reason for preventing it from being dropped. The Air Force had no reason. So, once it was ready and Japan had not surrendered, it was going to be used.

Yeah. Do you like the movie Oppenheimer? I don't know if you saw it or not.

I didn't see it. No, I'm very bad actually. I'm very bad at looking at movies on historical subjects I work on because it always annoys me.

Oh. Yeah, I thought it might be [annoying to you]. So that's why I was wondering.

Yeah, I know. It was a good film and people have told me it's a good film and I should have seen it. I didn't go and see it. I didn't see Downfall, either. The famous film about the last days in the Hitler bunker, which everybody again said it was terrific film and you must go and see it. But I didn't go and see it.

Oppenheimer is a complex figure, but he emerges, I suppose, in my books, as something of a baddie, really. Because, you know, he is the driving force at Los Alamos, behind producing a bomb, engineering a bomb in time. I mean, he wanted to use it against Nazi Germany and, of course being Jewish hated the Nazis, but it couldn't be used against Nazi Germany but that still didn't stop him from driving them on and on and on, you know, until it was absolutely clear that a bomb, or two bombs, in this case, would be ready.

I think one of the things about that is the assumption that everybody has, that we should be looking at Truman or Burns. We should look at the politicians. They are the ones who must have authorized it and could have stopped it. But it's not true. Truman was actually quite remote from what was going on. Delighted when it happened, but he was still quite remote from, you know, when it was going on. It was driven by the scientists and by the Army and Air Force commanders who were behind the whole project.

So, my next question is another kind of broader one. You've written a number of really good books. How does one become a good writer of history? What does it take and, kind of, what is your method?

Well, I saw your question. I mean, people have often asked me that. I mean, it has to be said that a lot of historians don't produce many books. They might produce one or two books and some articles and so on.

You have to be a bit driven. I could be, you know, I could be writing fantasy novels, perhaps, and be driven to do that, too. I'm quite driven to write history books. I like writing. I like the idea of communicating to people, often quite complex things in ways that are, you know, readable and understandable. And that's always been my aim, to write books which are academically respectable, but they can be read by a wide audience, jargon-free if they can be, and so on.

And I think, to be a good historian, you know, there are quite clearly a number of qualities one needs to have. I mean, one is a really strong imagination. It’s no good treating the subjects that you're looking at as something you might, you know, pin up on a wall and look at, but not really identify with. You've got to put yourself there somehow or other. And putting yourself there, I think the other thing that historians should do is always to realise that people you're writing about don't know what's going to happen. You know what's going to happen. But that doesn't help very much. So you really need to be able to explain why they're reaching the decisions they're reaching at the time. What are the circumstances that are shaping what they do. What are their expectations? How do they think X is going to happen?

Writing the history of war is particularly challenging because we all know how wars end. But you've got to imagine that. The people in the middle of the conflict actually don't know how wars are going to end. Will they end next year? Will they end the year after? And so on and so on. And putting yourself in that position, you ask rather difficult questions about, you know, popular morale about, you know, the emotional reaction to war and so on. At the end, of course, we know what happens and you can sum it up, but the important thing is to imagine yourself there and to imagine yourself looking forward and not imagine yourself looking back. Quite a difficult thing to do actually.

The other thing I think that that you need as an historian is, well, we've talked about this already, is to come with no moral assumptions. Because it is very easy. The famous 19th century historians, Carlyle and so on. I mean, they all looked at the past and judged it. You know, they moralized about the past. So and so was wicked, so and so was good, such and such was a hero, such and such a villain. It is very important not to come along and moralize about the past already having in your mind how you’re going to treat the subject because you think it's very bad or you think it's very good.

Now historians are not obviously morally neutral. As I've said before, I wish the atomic bombs had not been dropped. But the important thing is to understand why they were dropped. You know, I might be writing about slavery, and I wish that Europeans had not enslaved millions of Africans in the 17th and 18th century. But it happened. So, the important thing is to go back and try and explore how they justified it and with what consequences. So that's it. In a sense, a kind of independence of mind, I think historians need when they approach the past. Now, there are a couple of things I can suggest. Perhaps there are others.

I think we should also try to recognize that much of history is not ours, private, something we do between historians. But you know, history in particular is very public. There’s a public out there and they have a right to know about the past, to understand the past and interpret it, or look at the interpretations. So that, you know, it is very important to not only have rigorous scholarship, but to have a public face, to realise that this is something in particular which affects the wider culture and the wider community of which we’re a part. So long answers.

No, I love it. I think that's it. Academic historians have the training to find some of the sources and to parse the sources and all of that, but I think you're right. In many cases they're not really trained to write about or to write for the public or consider the public and in some cases are actively discouraged from doing that. And so yeah, there's this real, there's a tension between kind of what's needed and the big picture, but also what you might need for your promotion portfolio. They might be two very different things.

Yeah, but you can reconcile them or you can do both, of course. I think they are reconcilable. I mean, I understand why academic historians feel quite embattled, because, you know, there's a lot of people out there playing the purse strings and so on. You say, well, you know, what use is history? You know, why do we need it? Couldn't anyone be an historian? And so on and so on.

And so there is a tendency to retreat back into an ivory tower. To try and turn history into a science. Well, it's a science of a kind, but it's a particular kind of science. And all that has done actually is to exacerbate, I think, the gulf between the public perception of historians and what it is historians do. I mean, I think it is very important to be alive to public expectations and to serve those expectations when it's useful to do so.

So, I have only a couple questions left. One is, you've written a lot of things. How do you decide what to do next? Do you just have a list that you're already working from, or do you come across new things and think, oh wait, I want to do that next?

Well, I don't have a list. I mean, occasionally I have a couple of advance contracts which I have to do. I moved through a whole range of subjects. Early on, I was an economic historian, historian of the Third Reich, now I'm a historian for the Second World War in general.

And I think that, you know, one develops as an historian. You start doing something and then you find, you know, you’ve really, it's run out of steam. You've done what you want to do with that. And then you are attracted to something else. In my case, I'm attracted to things where I think there is a big question to answer. A big subject to tackle, like the bombing war book or like Blood and Ruins, the book on the Second World War, try to reframe the way we think about the Second World War.

The book I'm doing now is completely different from my other books, but it's something I've had on, (like Why War?), something I had on a back burner for quite a long time. And it's to do with the general history of fascination with Hitler since 1945. A fascination that will not go away. Hitler can be found in such a wide variety of environments: social media, YouTube, and so on, and so on. Among historians. Among politicians. Hitler is used for all sorts of reasons. And I want to do a book which explores how that's developed over time, why it’s that’s developed the way that it has. Why is it that a failed leader responsible for the biggest crime in world history is still, if you like, top of the bestseller list? And, you know, there's a more significant question underway. Why has it happened and why do we do it? And should we do it? So, I'm looking forward to it. I'm just in the foothills at the moment, but I'm looking forward to producing that.

Well, that that sounds really interesting to me. I also I'm curious about the long shadow of—so Alexander the Great, if Napoleon had never heard of Alexander the Great… Would that have changed his ambitions? And if Hitler had never heard of Napoleon? If Napoleon hadn't existed, you know, would that have created a different sense of horizon for him, for possibilities, or not? I wonder about that once in a while.

That's a very good question. Actually. It's a very good question because Napoleon did indeed read about Alexander the Great and Hitler certainly read about Napoleon. Would it have changed them? I doubt it. Actually, in the end I think they're driven by other things, as well. But you might look back at Napoleon and think it legitimises what you're doing. Or you might look at an example and say, well, you know, here's a guy who built a great empire and made his people great. Maybe I'll do that, too. And in both cases, fail.

Right. None of those stories really have happy endings. But it never seems to deter anyone.

No.

So, my final question, I guess in some ways we've touched on it a little bit, but not quite. Do you have any thoughts on the future of history? So, in terms of, as an academic discipline, in terms of the general public, maybe where things are going or they might be going or where you wish they would be going? Or any thoughts like that?

Well, there was a lot of talk twenty, thirty, forty years ago, you know, history was dying out as an academic discipline. University departments are going to close down and so on. You know, what do people do with a history degree, etc. etc? I remember a period of crisis. Historians worried about it. And in the 1980s, in British universities, the number of people teaching history fell quite dramatically. But it's been saved in a way by popular public interest in history.

I don't think it’s ever been greater. Every bookstore is stuffed with history books, there’s the history channel, history documentaries, and so on. Everywhere people have an endless appetite for historical subjects. And I think it is that popular history culture, if you like, that has helped to sustain academic history.

I'm an academic. History still has a lot to do, a lot of important things to do, and I don't think it will disappear. But there is always that that tension, if you like, between disciplines that see themselves as real sciences contributing to the wider community, whether they're in, you know, inventing new medicines or whatever it is, and historians who seem to have an easy life sitting archive and writing books. I think that tension probably won't disappear, but, at the moment, I think history is reasonably healthy and has some reasonably healthy future. And more important, perhaps, the history that is going on all around us will give historians a job to do for a long time.

Yeah. Do you listen to The Rest is History podcast at all?

I don't, I'm afraid. No.

It's an extremely popular podcast and it's basically just history. So I think, yeah, I think that's always… I mean, at my university, I feel like our department is still under pressure for low enrollment and things like that. But then you look at the podcast charts or you look at the movies or, like you're saying, you look at the bookstores and history.

 Yeah, I know. Yes.

There’s a disconnect between getting the undergraduate in the classroom and then everything that the adult graduate is consuming. There seems to be kind of a gap.

Yes, yes. Well, there is a gap, but, I think, I mean in many departments, in Britain for example, I mean historians are very alive to public history and what it is they're supposed to be contributing. You know, they have to do it. Every department is assessed, not just on its academic output, it's assessed on its public profile and what it's contributing to wider society. And that's history departments, too. And the result of that is it's raised the profile of historians in the broader community, whether they're helping with museums, whether they're providing advice on social welfare programs and so on. Many of my colleagues resented that. You know, why should we be having to do this? I think it's a good idea. I think historians shouldn't any more than, you know, natural scientists or biologists think of themselves as separate from what's going on in the wider community. We need to be integrated into the wider community. And we have something to contribute. So, I'm, you know, I'm reasonably confident that as long as that disconnect is reconnected, historians and history still has still have a viable future. Now ask me the question in thirty years’ time and see whether I was wrong.

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice