The Tweets of War: What’s Past Is Postable

Photographs From Getty Images

REALTIMEWWII TWEETS FROM NOV. 8, 1939: Left: 8 p.m. Hitler beginning a speech in a beer hall, Munich. In the pillar behind him is a concealed bomb. Center: The bomb was planted 3 nights ago by Georg Elser, a German communist. It is timed to go off in 1 hour, at 9 p.m. Right: 9:20 p.m. The bomb has exploded! Pillar that concealed it has collapsed, bringing balcony crashing down.

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Published: November 27, 2011

Hitler spent decades plotting his campaign for world domination. Alwyn Collinson, 24, a recent graduate in Renaissance history from Oxford University, hatched his own plan to invade Poland in a mere five days.

On Aug. 26 Mr. Collinson was just a marketing manager at a magazine in Oxford toying with the notion of starting some kind of a real-time Twitter project that would get people’s attention — maybe something like Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, but that wouldn’t scare them to death.

Then suddenly he hit on the idea of tweeting the biggest terrestrial war of all time, and on Aug. 31 — roughly 72 years to the hour after Hitler’s tanks moved across the frontier — the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII was under way.

Since then the dominoes have fallen quickly. The number of followers jumped to 10,000 from about 300 by mid-September, after the project was featured on the blog The Next Web. By Nov. 9, the same date in 1939 that two British spies were captured by the SS at the Dutch border town of Venlo, the total had hit 45,000. Last week Mr. Collinson had more than 140,000 followers, dwarfing the numbers for similar feeds like @ukwarcabinet (based on documents from the National Archives in Britain detailing Winston Churchill’s cabinet debates in 1941).

Volunteers have started translating the RealTimeWWII feed into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Turkish, with talks under way for versions in French, Dutch and German.

“The amount of interest has amazed me,” Mr. Collinson said recently in a telephone interview. “I don’t have any pretensions to grand historical scholarship. I just want to get people interested.”

He seems to have chosen an effective medium. “Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it,” declares the tag line of TwHistory, an educational Web site that began in 2009 with a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg in salvoes of 140 characters or less. So, apparently, are those who remember it.

One can hardly spend an hour on Twitter without getting caught up in a blow-by-blow account of the Civil War, Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1911 polar expedition or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, not to mention a welter of biographical offerings from the likes of Paul Revere, John Quincy Adams, Churchill and Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century London diarist, who has amassed more than 22,000 followers. Pepys’s maid, Jane Birch, even has a feed — or at least she did until last March, when she abruptly quit after posting complaints about her employer’s incessant snoring and incontinent dog.

Mr. Collinson puts an appealingly modest face on his wildly immodest project. Last Tuesday, while Hitler was berating his generals for their lack of faith in his ultimate triumph — “dramatic irony stuff,” Mr. Collinson said — he was busy putting the finishing touches on a marketing schedule for Daily Information, the magazine where he holds down a job while pumping out up to 40 war-related tweets a day, timed as much as possible to the precise hour. (The social media tool SocialOomph helps him schedule posts for times when he’s supposed to be working or sleeping.)

“World War II gives me something to do with my time,” he said. “The office job keeps me grounded in the real world.”

When the project began, Mr. Collinson relied mainly on “a few authoritative books,” he said, along with whatever he could find via Google. But over time his readers have led him to some far-flung and obscure sources. One reader sent him an article from a Polish newspaper describing an assassination attempt against Hitler in Oct. 1939 that went unmentioned in the timelines he was consulting. Others sent links to relatives’ wartime diaries, posted on little-read blogs.

Mr. Collinson said his goals are to educate his followers about the basic sequence of events and give a sense of what the war felt like to ordinary people who had no idea how it would end.

“I still get dozens of tweets every day from people who say, ‘I forgot I was following World War II, and I suddenly thought the Germans were about to invade Holland,’ ” Mr. Collinson said. “That’s exactly the effect I want: to convey the fear, the uncertainty, the shock. That’s what it was like for the people who lived through it.”

Professional historians have been mostly sympathetic to Mr. Collinson’s approach.

“People in the past weren’t living in the past, they were living in their own present,” Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale and the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” said in an e-mail. “These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”

Max Hastings, whose new book, “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945,” was one of Mr. Collinson’s initial sources, concurred. “I don’t think this can substitute for the sort of coherent narrative and analysis only books can provide,” he said. “But it offers a sense of immediacy and pace that a younger audience, especially, finds attractive.”

Attractive for now at least. Andrew Roberts, the author of the recent narrative history “The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War,” wondered if Mr. Collinson would be able to sustain reader interest through the period known as the “phony war,” also known at the time as the “bore war.”

“It wasn’t the most exciting time,” Mr. Roberts said. “As far as the ground war was concerned, nothing happens between Oct. 18” — when Hitler issued a directive for the invasion of the West — “and the invasion of Norway and Denmark.”

Mr. Collinson, however, said he’s “looking forward, if that’s the word,” to the Soviet invasion of Finland on Wednesday, though even he is not sure he can make it all the way to the Allied victory over Japan in August 2017. “If I try to keep it going for six years, I’d go mad,” he said.

Other blow-by-blow historical Twitter efforts have run aground. @PatriotCast, a feed devoted to the Revolutionary War with some 2,600 followers, abruptly ceased operations last January with the rather anticlimactic announcement that “a large shipment of gunpowder has arrived in Egg Harbor, N.J.” @MonticelloTJ, a feed based on Thomas Jefferson’s diaries, went silent in Sept. 2010, following weeks of bland remarks about the weather and the state of Monticello’s millet field. More controversially a 10th-anniversary Sept. 11 feed put together by The Guardian in Britain shut down after a mere 16 tweets, following a public outcry.

Mr. Collinson said he is mindful of issues of taste as he approaches the Holocaust. But he’s also determined to stick to his neutral, just-the-facts approach, even as the internationalization of the feed has opened his eyes to the limitations of his own British perspective.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, points out that that bias was evident from Mr. Collinson’s first tweet. The Chinese, after all, date the beginning of World War II not to Hitler’s invasion of Poland but to the Japanese invasion of North China in 1937.

Still, Mr. Wasserstrom said, RealTimeWWII may have laid claim to the ultimate tweetable historical event: rich in documentary sources but not yet overwhelmed by data-streams like, well, Twitter.

“You couldn’t tweet something that unfolded in tweets,” Mr. Wasserstrom said. “You’d just go crazy. There’s something about World War II. Even though it’s huge, there’s something manageable about it.”