World War II is enshrined in our collective memory as the good war - a victory of good over evil. However, the bombing war has always troubled this narrative as total war transformed civilians into legitimate targets and raised unsettling questions such as whether it was possible for Allies and Axis alike to be victims of aggression. In Bombing the City, an unprecedented comparative history of how ordinary Britons and Japanese experienced bombing, Aaron William Moore offers a major new contribution to these debates. Utilising hundreds of diaries, letters, and memoirs, he recovers the voices of ordinary people on both sides - from builders, doctors and factory-workers to housewives, students and policemen - and reveals the shared experiences shaped by gender, class, race, and age. He reveals how it was that the British and Japanese public continued to support bombing elsewhere even as they experienced firsthand its terrible impact at home.
This is the story of how women in France and Britain between 1915 and 1933 appropriated the cultural identity of female war veteran in order to have greater access to public life and a voice in a political climate in which women were rarely heard on the public stage. The 'veterans' covered by this history include former nurses, charity workers, secret service agents and members of resistance networks in occupied territory, as well as members of the British auxiliary corps. What unites these women is how they attempted to present themselves as 'female veterans' in order to gain social advantages and give themselves the right to speak about the war and its legacies. Alison S. Fell also considers the limits of the identity of war veteran for women, considering as an example the wartime and post-war experiences of the female industrial workers who led episodes of industrial action.
In this insightful and revealing study, Justin Fantauzzo uses a wide range of documentary and visual sources to explore the experience and memory of British and Dominion soldiers who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia during the First World War. He shows that not only was the experience of these campaigns markedly different to their counter-parts on the Western Front, but so too were the memories and portrayals of these campaigns in the inter-war period. Fantauzzo's analysis highlights the disparities and contradictions that exist in the experience and memory of war and helps us to rethink what the war meant to the soldiers who fought in this region, how soldiers understood the war itself and how it was remembered.
From 1940 to 1944, German soldiers not only fought in and ruled over France, but also lived their lives there. While the combat experiences of German soldiers are relatively well-documented, as are the everyday lives of the occupied French population, we know much less about occupiers' daily activities beyond combat, especially when it comes to men who were not top-level administrators. Using letters, photographs, and tour guides, alongside official sources, Julia S. Torrie reveals how ground-level occupiers understood their role, and how their needs and desires shaped policy and practices. At the same time as soldiers were told to dominate and control France, they were also encouraged to sight-see, to photograph and to 'consume' the country, leading to a familiarity that limited violence rather than inciting it. The lives of these ordinary soldiers offer new insights into the occupation of France, the history of Nazism and the Second World War.
With the outbreak of war in 1914, an estimated 30,000 German civilians in African and Asian colonies were violently uprooted and imprisoned. Britain's First World War internment of German settlers seriously challenged the structures that underpinned nineteenth-century imperialism. Through its analysis of this internment, this book highlights the impact that the First World War had on the notion of a common European 'civilising mission' and the image of empire in the early twentieth century. Mahon Murphy examines the effect of the war on a collective European colonial identity, perceptions of internment in the extra-European theatres of war, and empires in transition during war. Policymakers were forced to address difficult questions about the future rule of Germany's colonies and the nature of empire in general. Far from a conflict restricted to European powers, the First World War triggered a worldwide remaking of ideas, institutions and geopolitics.
Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war and the Cold War more broadly. With captivating historical detail and innovative conceptual frames, Kwon's moving, creative analysis provides fresh insights into the Korean conflict, civil war and reconciliation, history and memory and critical political theory.
Comparatively little is known about the musical cultures of the British armed forces during the Great War. This groundbreaking study is the first to examine music's vital presence in a range of military contexts including military camps, ships, aerodromes and battlefields, canteen huts, hospitals and PoW camps. Emma Hanna argues that music was omnipresent in servicemen's wartime existence and was a vital element for the maintenance of morale. She shows how music was utilised to stimulate recruitment and fundraising, for diplomatic and propaganda purposes, and for religious, educational and therapeutic reasons. Music was not in any way ephemeral, it was unmatched in its power to cajole, console, cheer and inspire during the conflict and its aftermath. This study is a major contribution to our understanding of the wartime realities of the British armed forces during the Great War.
