The new Cambridge IGCSE™ and O Level History syllabus (0470) from 2024 includes a new depth study: Depth Study E The Second World War in Europe and the Asia–Pacific, 1939 to c.1945. In this blog, author and associate headmaster, John Etty, gives his top tips for teaching this area of history.
Writing the history of military events goes back to the earliest historians, but it is sometimes regarded as inferior to political, economic or diplomatic histories. Our students often find military history intriguing—many became interested in the school subject because of an outside interest in the technology of warfare, and some even arrive in our classrooms hoping for courses filled with studies of planes, tanks and battles.
Wars are traumatic events, though, and teaching the history of the Second World War must be handled with care. This blog discusses 5 tips to help you develop your students’ understanding of one of the pivotal moments of 20th century history.
1. Allow your students to enjoy studying the history of the Second World War
Military history, and the history of the Second World War, carries a certain interest for many people. Many students will be intrigued by the prospect of studying the war formally and from a historical perspective. You can capitalise on this enthusiasm, and channel it into productive engagement with the topic. Start with an assessment of what students already know about the topic. Use your evidence of their prior knowledge and misconceptions to guide your planning, in line with the five tips presented here.
2. Stress the historical, not the heroic
A great deal of the content relating to the Second World War that your students will have encountered previously is fictionalised. While the basis for many World War Two movies, novels and games may be historical, many of the memorable details and narratives students will be familiar with are not historically accurate.
Take opportunities to challenge the popular but inaccurate or simplistic representations of the war when you can. Don’t allow your teaching to be reduced to ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ in the way some popular accounts present the war. In History, the teacher’s responsibility is to increase students’ knowledge of the events. Use valid accounts of the events that come from authentic contemporary sources or from respected historians, rather than fictionalised or disputed versions.
The new coursebook produced by Cambridge University Press includes a digital chapter on the Second World War available via Cambridge GO which embodies this principle.
3. Where and when?
The Second World War was complex, not least in the number of different fronts on which the fighting occurred and the development and deployment of different weapons. Use maps and timeline exercises in the classroom to ensure that students understand the sequence of historical events affecting civilian populations in different places during the Second World War.
Simply knowing the geographical location or the date of a significant event does not mean that students will understand them fully, but this knowledge is vitally important for more sophisticated learning.
4. Treat the subject with sensitivity
Remember that teaching about the Second World War must be done sensitively and it must use methods that support students as they confront dark and unpleasant realities from our history. The war was destructive, violent and cruel in the extreme, and although it has faded from living memory almost entirely now, students will have different connections with it. This may be especially true for the sections dealing with the impact on civilian populations.
You can use timelines to highlight the cultures of civilian populations before the outbreak of war and show students how the Second World War changed life for ordinary people around the world. War is the harshest test for any society, and the social impact of the Second World War was profound in many parts of the world. Do not avoid teaching the social impact of the war, but treat the victims and the survivors with dignity as you do so.
5. Military history is still history
The same concepts that guide the Key Questions and the other Depth Studies in the Cambridge IGCSE™ History syllabus still apply. Military history has the same aim as all other branches of history: to outline the events, changes and continuities that affected people’s lives at different times, to explain connections between events, to uncover relationships between causes and consequences, and to infer patterns of similarities and differences.
Some of your students will enjoy discussing the technological changes that changed the course of events on the Eastern Front, the German errors that made victory in the Battle of Britain certain for the RAF, the tactical reasons why island-hopping in the Pacific was successful, or the methods employed by resistance fighters in Malaya and France. It is in these details that really profound lessons about History are learnt.
While it may be tempting, because the war itself was unique, to see the history of the Second World War differently, it is important that students are able to approach this topic with the same academic objectives they would have for any other part of the course in view.
Discover more about our new Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Coursebook. The new edition covers all six of the core ‘key questions’, as well as five ‘Depth studies’ including Germany, Russia, the USA, First World War and Second World War.
John Etty is Associate Headmaster at Auckland Grammar School in New Zealand. He is also co-author of our new Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History series.
