For those of my generation the shadow of the Second World War has never fully lifted. The war lives with us in subtle and improbable ways. I was a child during the war, living in the middle of the United States, and in a sense I was physically untouched by it. But the war left its imprint on me, my family, my childhood friends, and the people I came to know in adulthood and as colleagues. I was too young to remember the events of the 1930s and Pearl Harbor, but I do remember coming down to breakfast and being told it was D-day and not understanding what that meant. I remember being sent home early from school when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. I do not actually remember V-E day or V-J day, but I remember “the boys” coming home, sort of one by one. Particularly, I remember airplanes flying over our little town—a town then well out of the path of any airplanes in those days. But suddenly, literally out of the blue, preceded only by a roar of engines, a fighter plane or a bomber would fly low over the town and would return and crisscross above the streets; and everyone—all of us children, housewives in aprons, men in shirtsleeves—would rush out into the streets in great excitement and look up into the sky, and someone would say, oh, that was so-and-so’s boy, he grew up on 10th Street.
Even as children, the war took over our lives and we played war all the time. Small hills became South Pacific beaches, front porches with railings became ships, and fuel-oil tanks on stilts and with pipes and ladders became submarines. Equipped with packsacks, belts, and helmet liners from the new army surplus stores and inspired by the Saturday matinee films we saw ourselves in turn as Marines, submariners, bomber pilots, and commandos. We collected shoulder patches and insignias, as well as airplane identification cards. The American Legion drum and bugle corps practiced along the streets on summer evenings, making stirring march music part of the experience. Eventually we had teachers who were living heroes who fought at Guadalcanal, flew fighter planes, were held prisoner by the Japanese, or landed at Normandy. We became obsessed with the details and the minutia—our favorite airplane, aircraft carrier, or general.
Now the war has become less obvious, less overt, but present, just below the surface nonetheless: Friends and colleagues who had been refugees and displaced persons forced to emigrate, colleagues on antisubmarine patrol out of Northern Ireland, friends caught up in the holocaust, colleagues who had been bombed out in London, acquaintances torpedoed in the Atlantic. Almost everyone of my time period has a story about the war, was affected by the war, or is in close contact with someone who was. In that way, for people of my age, even as the actual soldiers and sailors themselves are going fast, the war is still very much with us.
As a historian also the war has been a major preoccupation for me. The Second World War was never my special area of research, but it was inescapable in most of the classes that I taught. The perspective was now different—what were the causes, who was responsible, when were the turning points, what were the key strategic decisions, who made the most irretrievable mistakes, why did the war end the way it did, what was the legacy of the war, what can be learned from the war to prevent a repetition? The micro of the favorite fighter plane gave way to the macro—the large picture, the command decisions, the causes and effects. But this too has its comfortable routine, its familiar “Time Marches On” litany—Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Manchuria, China, Pearl Harbor! Numerous historians have attempted to answer the question of how the war started, and as a result quite a brilliant and insightful historical literature has been written. My own interest has increasingly focused on the question of where did the war start, and there is of course no real agreement about that matter either. I was, nevertheless, struck by the fact that the first shots fired in the Second World War for the English-speaking world—the beginning of the war in the West—involved the four countries in whose histories I have had a longtime interest: the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Ireland. The first shot was fired by a German submarine on 3 September 1939, which sunk a British passenger ship, the TSS Athenia, sailing from Glasgow, Belfast, and Liverpool to Quebec and Montreal. It was carrying passengers of British, Canadian, and U.S. citizenship, as well as a number of refugees from Europe; and after the ship was sunk the survivors were brought into Galway, in Ireland; Glasgow, in the United Kingdom; and Halifax, in Canada. Thus within eight or nine hours of war having been declared, all four countries, and their citizens, were physically involved in the war with Germany. It was surprising to me that despite the enormous historical literature that exists about the Second World War there is only one book in English, and that written over fifty years ago, about this tragic incident. I am now attempting to tell afresh, and with sources not previously available, the story of the sinking of the Athenia and the beginning of the Second World War in the West. It is also my attempt to deal with the shadow of the war as it extends into our own times.
—FRANCIS M. CARROLL