Pitt and the editor in chief, the renowned military theorist and historian Sir Basil Liddel Hart, wanted to create a definitive record of the Second World War which could withstand academic scrutiny and be accessible to the general public.
Koch, Alvin D. Coox, Phyllis Auty, Martin Blumenson, Antony Brett-James, John Vader, Rudolf Bohmer, Raleigh Trevelyan produced articles, as well as AJP Taylor, who acted as editor in chief for later editions after the death of Sir Basil Liddel Hart.
In issue 45, which covered the Katyn Massacre, the discovery of the bodies of several thousand captured Polish officers in 1943, which was widely believed to have been carried out by the Soviets and which remained an unmentionable subject between the Allies after the war, the historian Jerrard Tickell attempted to reconstruct the events around the atrocity which took place at the Hill of Goats site.
His article was followed by a piece by a Soviet scientist purporting to be a forensic re-examination of all the evidence such as the conditions of the bodies, their levels of decomposition and the remaining artefacts to 'prove' that the Polish officers could have only been murdered during the period of the German occupation of the region.
Using witness accounts, selective testimonies and the findings of the official Russian investigation into the affair, Doctor of Juridical Sciences Arkady Poltorak finished with the paragraph, Thus was unmasked the provocative act of the Nazis, thus was established with complete clarity the fact of the monstrous killing by the Nazi authorities of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn WoodDuring the Perestroika period in the early 1990s, the Russian authorities finally admitted that the killings had been carried out by the NKVD, the secret police organization used to enforce Stalin's rule.