In spring 1941, the Iraqis and the Vichy French in Syria made agreements with the Axis powers that might have had disastrous consequences for the Allied war effort if the Allies hadn’t improvised a jerrybuilt force to respond.
In a Baker-Nord Center for Humanities Faculty-Work-in-Progress talk, John Broich, associate professor of history, will discuss this event in history.
He will argue that this fight in Iraq and the Levant had outsized geopolitical importance in part because it was relatively small in scale compared to the titanic battles in North Africa and Russia in the same year. This magnified the importance of the choices made by relatively few people, from rulers to common soldiers across the globe, and his book focuses on these people and choices.
His talk centers on the difficulty he has encountered getting at the truth of affair when, he says, the historical sources have been obscured by wartime propaganda, colonial delusions, nationalist flimflam and erasure.
This lecture, titled “Iraq and Syria, 1941: Working Around Lies, Exaggerations, Distortions, and Deletions to Tell a Little-known Story of WWII, ” will be held Tuesday, Oct. 10, at noon in Clark Hall, Room 206.