African Correspondents in the Second World War in Burma: Reporting on Soldiers’ Experiences of Conflict, June–August 1945

The Calling Blighty series of films produced by the Combined Kinematograph Service produced towards the end of the Second World War were one-reel films in which soldiers gave short spoken messages to the camera as a means of connecting the front line and the home front. These are the first ever films where men speak openly in their regional accents, and they have profound meaning for remembrance, documentary representation and the ecology of film in wartime. Of the 400 films (or ‘issues’) made, 64 survive. Each of those contained around 25 individual messages. Men – and a very few women - from a particular city, town or region were grouped together for the films to make regional screenings back in UK cinemas and town halls possible. Personnel from all three services are featured, but the men are predominantly from the army units. Screenings took place at a cinema in the subjects’ local area and were usually organised by the regional Army Welfare Committee. The names and addresses of those to be invited to the screenings were sent to the UK along with the films. Until now, these films have barely been researched, and yet are a valuable source of social history as well as representing a different mode from the mainstream of British wartime documentary. This book expands the history of Calling Blighty and places it in a broader context, both past and present. New research reveals the origins of the film series and draws comparisons with written and oral contemporary sources. Steve Hawley is an artist/filmmaker whose work has been screened worldwide, and has collaborated closely with the North West Film Archive UK. He is emeritus professor at the Manchester Metropolitan University UK. Using memoirs and diaries, Steve Hawley has researched the roles in the Burma campaign of participants in the surviving films, and traced over 160 of the families of the men – and two men still alive – and recreated these wartime screenings. Hawley’s book is part description of the films, part reclamation of a largely unknown genre of wartime filmmaking, partly an account of the Burma campaign, and partly a discussion of war and memory. Engagingly and warmly written. It will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of war studies, especially those specializing in the social rather than military history of warfare, and historians of British wartime cinema and documentary. Also useful for an undergraduate audience, in history, media/film studies. Potential for readers with an interest in the Second World War, particularly the war in Burma, and those with an interest in family history of the period.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

During both the First World War and the Second World War, New Zealand despatched large Expeditionary Forces to assist in Britain's war effort. The home front experience was markedly different during each war. The defining characteristics of the home front during the Great War were the voluntary nature of patriotic participation and the remoteness of the war. In contrast, during the Second World War, the front was much closer to New Zealand, and the pressures of this much larger‐scale conflict meant that the government was forced to exert much more control over the civilian community. The historiography of the New Zealand home front reflects these characteristics. The historiography of the Great War home front, where day‐to‐day life continued with a large degree of continuity, is very limited. In contrast, much attention has been paid to life on the home front during the Second World War, as the civilian population was directed into war work as well as military service.

This study suggests that, from a situation where co-operation between the British Army and the RAF in south-east Asia hardly existed it grew to have a profound effect on the course of the war in Burma, particularly in air supply. The evidence shows that air supply became critical to the successful prosecution of the campaign. The study also challenges the view that air interdiction is always of major importance in land campaigns. The Malayan defence strategy was flawed as a result of pre-war misconceptions and prejudices, exacerbated by institutional bureaucracy and fiscal restrictions. Burma, a 'Cinderella' defence area, was a case of too little, too late. In the first year of the war; given the problems of finance, labour for defence works and reinforcements, even extensive co-operation between the army and the air force might not have produced a different result, but it might have made defeat less ignominious. Underlying the Burma campaign, there were two fundamental factors outside climate and terrain affecting co-operation. Distances and the multiplicity of the Allied aims. Distance detrimentally affected surface transport and US support of China and establishing airfields to bomb Japan, caused the air supply 'Hump' route to be a constant drain on resources. A comparison with the Berlin Airlift indicates the scale of effort required by the air supply needs in Burma. This was at a level far greater than elsewhere throughout the Second World War and provides unwitting evidence for the unparalleled levels of inter-Service co-operation which these operations demonstrated. The particular approach to the study was partially determined by the scarcity of documentation, consequently the analysis has been fraught with difficulties. Admirable campaign histories exist, but these also have been shaped by the available documentation and secondary sources, all serving to accentuate the methodological problems. Despite these difficulties this research has proved the vital importance of inter-Service co-operation in the Burma campaign.

Reviewed by: Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe ed. by Jason Crouthamel et al. Judith Szapor Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, Julia Barbara Köhne, eds., Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 407 pp. In November 2014, at the start of a long line of scholarly events commemorating the centennial of the First World War, the Center for Jewish History in New York City hosted a conference; the resulting volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Oxford UP, 2017) was, as its editors, Jonathan Karp and Marsha L. Rozenblit stated, "one of the first academic works devoted expressly to the subject of World War I and the Jews." (17) Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion; Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe continues this exploration with a tighter scope but deeper reach. Three of the volume's four editors have contributed important monographs to the history of World War I in Germany, on topics ranging from the military, gender, and sexuality to memory and trauma, and the volume offers an even more wide-ranging survey of German Jewish war experiences. The four sections of the collection focus on Jews in the military, contested identities in the settings of front and home front, and two papers each on the representation of the war experience in film and literature and on postwar narratives, both in psychological discourse and nationalist war literature. Together, the articles offer an admirable range of disciplinary and methodological approaches with the aim of highlighting Jewish experiences and responses to anti-Semitism and introducing new sources that add nuance to Jewish and German narratives in an effort to inform but also reflect the subtle shifts in Jewish-German relationships. Any claim of a lack of studies centered on Jews and World War I should be understood in relative terms, in comparison to the still-growing scholarship on what came after—and what made most scholars see the First World [End Page 106] War as merely a prequel to—the Shoah. The significance of the war was never questioned by scholars or in popular memory; it was a paramount historical event that fundamentally affected the lives of European Jews and Jewish communities. Among the most significant of the often contradictory changes the war ushered in, it destroyed the empires the majority of Jews lived in but gave them, in the Balfour Declaration, the right to self-determination, at least in principle. Through military service and, for women, service on the home front, the war offered Jewish citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the state and earn full acceptance; at the same time, by displacement on a massive scale and rising anti-Semitism, it brought their identity and belonging into question. Scholarship from the 1960s until quite recently tended to approach German Jewish experiences during the First World War and in the postwar period with this hindsight understanding, and it described Jewish-German relations in the binaries of assimilation/anti-Semitism, exclusion/inclusion. Scholars highlighted the role of the 1916 Judenzählung initiated by the Prussian War Ministry as the decisive moment in the breakdown of these relations, leading to toxic anti-Semitism, and, eventually, the Holocaust. A stellar lineup of recent studies by, among others, Marsha Rozenblit, Derek Penslar, Tim Grady, and David Fine, presented a more nuanced, fluid, and complicated view of identity and Jewish experiences as well as Jewish and non-Jewish responses to and during the war, offering major corrections to this long-reigning narrative. The volume takes a firm position on the revisionist side of this debate, and most of the chapters argue that anti-Semitism was not the decisive factor in the everyday front and home front experience of German Jews. Anchoring the volume, Jason Crouthamel's chapter on Jewish and non-Jewish front soldiers supports this view by presenting their experience as a shared one and argues for an interpretation of the trends of wartime Jewish– non-Jewish relations within its own context—and with more emphasis on the testimonies...

What influence did the First World War have on German civil law court rulings? Recently completed studies have stressed the importance of a concept called the ‘home front’ for understanding the so-called decisions of the courts during the Second World War. This concept is associated with ideas such as the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend. It rests on the assumption that the population's good will is decisive for the outcome of war. This historiography suggests that, particularly in their decisions on the general clauses of the BGB (German civil code), the courts advanced what were in effect legislative ideas in seeking to stabilise the ‘home front’, to adapt the law to the changed circumstances brought about by the war. This essay analyses whether the notion of a ‘home front’ was also determinative in the First World War. Reaching out further, the influence of the First World War on the judiciary's self-image in Germany will be investigated.

Dominant societies and minorities in the two world wars, Panikos Panayi. Part 1 Europe: the kiss of France - the Republic and the alsatians during the First World War, Paul Smith the role of the special organizations in the Armenian genocide of World War 1, Vahakn Dadrian frontiers of genocide - Jews in the Eastern war zones 1914-20 and 1954, Mark Levene sex and semitism - Jewish women in war and peace in Britain, Tony Kushner British Justice at Work - internment in the Second World War, Colin Holmes. Part 2 North America: social identity and the home front - World War 1 and the Great Migration of black southerners, James Grossman victims of the home front - enemy aliens in the United States during World War 1, Jorg Nagler from relocation to redress - Japanese Americans and Canadians, 1941-1988, Roger Daniels allies or subversives? the Canadian government's ambivalent attitude towards German Canadians in the Second World War, Robert Keyserlingk. Part 3 Australia: fighting the war at home - the campaign against enemy aliens in Australia during World War 1, Gerhard Fischer Inspired by Patriotic Hysteria? - internment policy towards enemy aliens in Australia during the Second World War, Kay Saunders.

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front.

This chapter surveys life on the German Home Front during the Second World War through three main themes. The first is popular morale, and the tension between the need to mobilize society for war, and the regime’s fear that asking too much of Germans would undermine their support. Adolf Hitler and other key figures such as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels paid a great deal of attention to popular morale, including women’s morale, and this shaped and to some degree limited their wartime choices. A second major theme is the Third Reich’s exploitation of German occupied territories as a source of food, raw materials, and labour. While surveying the forms and extent of German exactions, the chapter examines civilian responses to wartime shortages, and considers how much civilians knew about the increasingly brutal treatment of forced labourers, POWs, and Jews. Finally, the chapter underlines the interconnectedness of home and war fronts throughout the conflict. As initial successes gave away to stalemate and a reversal of Germany’s fortunes, notably at Stalingrad, wartime losses touched the Home Front deeply. This, alongside the total mobilization of society and widespread aerial bombing and evacuations, underlined that home and war fronts, never fully separate, were blending together as the Reich slid towards defeat.

This thesis seeks to present a Karen perspective on that people’s struggle in the civil war in Burma that has now lasted for more than fifty year. It took pains to define the various branches of the Karen nation and to trace its historical background. It highlighted the long history of ethnic antagonism and warfare amongst the different ethnic groups in Burma and, in particular, the persecution that the Karen have suffered at various times at the hands of their aggressive neighbours. It argued that this history of persecution and its more recent recurrence lay at the core of the outbreak of civil war in the wake of Burma gaining its independence.It is argued that the Karen felt particularly aggrieved that their loyalty towards the British allies during World War II counted little in the planning for post-war independence and that substantive power was handed over to the Burmese ethnic group and that Karen claims for an independent state were ignored. It is argued that the Burmese initiated military conflict and forced the Karen to take up arms in their defence in a quest to establish their own independent government in the Karen ‘liberated’ areas. Over time, other ethnic nationalities joined the Karen in opposition to the Rangoon ruling government and this alliance has pressed for the establishment of a genuine federal system for Burma, with the right of self-determination to be guaranteed to all the ethnic nations.It is also argued that the Burmese military regime has continued to prosecute what amounts to a genocidal war and their policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ has placed them amongst the world’s worst violators of human rights. Trade, investment and, particularly, arms sales from ASEAN members and other neighbouring countries have enabled this military regime to further pursue this policy with the result that thousands of refugees have fled to Thailand and other neighbouring countries. Despite this, however, this thesis shows that the Karen led resistance politically sand has continued its military opposition to the Burmese regime, celebrating the fifieth anniversary of their struggle.

Reviewed by: Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball, and: North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War ed. by Shepherd W. McKinley, Steven Sabol, and: The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924 ed. by Matthew L. Downs, M. Ryan Floyd Petra DeWitt Texas and World War I. By Gregory W. Ball. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2019. Pp. [viii], 156. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-62511-050-3.) North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War. Edited by Shepherd W. McKinley and Steven Sabol. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 347. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-414-4.) The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924. Edited by Matthew L. Downs and M. Ryan Floyd. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 248. $47.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6937-7.) The centennial of World War I has contributed to new published studies about the conflict and its impact. The three works under review focus on the [End Page 202] home front in southern states and battlefront encounters by southern men. Together they offer new insight into regional experiences during a national emergency and thus fit well with the growing number of local studies about American involvement in the First World War. Individually, they demonstrate that, although the need to produce foodstuffs and weaponry hastened the transition of the agricultural economy of the South into a more modern and industrialized one, social and political traditions changed at a much slower pace despite new challenges brought on by the war. Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball is a concise study that evaluates the many changes the war caused in Texas. The author expertly places the arrival of World War I into the context of Texas’s heightened sense of preparedness for military action owing to the unrest along its border with revolutionary Mexico. Texans, like so many Americans, greeted the declaration of war with public assertions of patriotism, formed home guard companies in several communities to counter any potential threats from Mexico, joined American Red Cross chapters, and purchased more Liberty Bonds than required. The state’s Council of Defense created hundreds of county and community councils to coordinate the war effort at the local level. Despite drought conditions, Texas increased food and livestock production. Women in Texas, as they did throughout the nation, conserved food, served as nurses, and worked in factories. Although strained racial tensions contributed to the Houston riot in 1917, African Americans nevertheless held patriotic meetings, supported the war effort, and sent their men to war. Texans were also suspicious of foreigners, especially German immigrants who were not naturalized citizens. Newspapers fanned growing anti-German sentiment by publishing rumors of German spy activities and the arrests of suspected saboteurs. Ball, however, does not evaluate just how many of the accused actually received convictions under the Espionage Act (1917) and whether any of the existing German-language newspapers suffered as a result of the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917). Such analysis could have measured the depth of anti-German sentiment in the state. The remaining chapters focus on military aspects, especially the implementation of the Selective Service Act in Texas (1917), the turning of men into soldiers at several training camps in the state, and their experiences on the western front in Europe. The author effectively illustrates that the appeal to the volunteer spirit to enlarge the ranks of the Texas National Guard and the drafting of men into the regular army was quite successful because the state was already prepared for military action due to unrest along the Texas-Mexico border. Ball concludes that the war also had a political impact on the home front because younger politicians, such as Sam Rayburn, replaced the older ones and guided the nation into a new political direction by asking what power the national government had over its citizens. Ball has read numerous Texas and out-of-state newspapers and letters to learn about the battlefield encounters of Texas soldiers assigned to the Thirty-sixth and Ninetieth Army divisions. These primary accounts are the best aspect of this well-structured study. The...

\She is lost to time and place\

In Katherine Mansfield's 1922 story ‘The Fly’, a father, mourning the loss of his son in the Great War six years earlier, tortures a fly until it dies, because he ‘wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel’. The story bears similarities to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus , in which the eponymous general, after the murder of his sons and the rape of his daughter, enacts similar revenge on a harmless insect, because ‘Grief has so wrought on him / He takes false shadows for true substances.’ Shakespeare's tale of a Roman general facing the consequences of his wartime choices is paralleled in Mansfield's story, which Claire Buck argues is a representation of ‘the national task of mourning’ in which ‘the apparent simplicity of grief is refused’. Indeed, the father in Mansfield's story, known as ‘the Boss’ throughout the text, challenges the reader's efforts to sympathise with the character, as his ‘grinding feeling of wretchedness’ (361) is in part a function of the pride and control that tempers his ability to express emotion even when ‘He wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep …’ (359). Reading Mansfield's story with the allusion to Shakespeare's play, which is itself based on Greek and Roman antecedents, suggests that a correlation can be found between the Great War and both classical and contemporary mythology. Even if, according to Vincent Sherry, a common interpretation is that the Great War ‘stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries’, I would argue that for Mansfield this line through time serves not solely to separate but also to connect. It is a means for drawing parallels between women's experiences of conflict through the ages to the contemporary moment in which daughters, as well as sons, succumb to the Great War's destruction. The idea that the First World War is a great divide, separating present from past, old from new, ancient from modern is not entirely accurate. For though, in many ways, as Susan Kingsley Kent notes, the war ‘defied traditional terms and habits of thought’,5 it also marked a continuation of the developments that had been building for decades, ‘a kind of imaginative continuity’, as Trudi Tate puts it.

In recent years, the World War II homefront has become a fertile field for historical scholarship. For several decades after the war, historians wrote extensively about the New Deal and the Cold War but neglected the wartime homefront. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began to fill that gap with a number of outstanding comprehensive accounts and many more specialized studies. As the United States celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the war in the 1990s, historians looked at the impact ofthe war even more closely than before, and we now have a rich collection of scholarship dealing with the entire wartime experience. following are highlights of that scholarship, dealing with the themes appearing in this issue ofthe OAH Magazine of History, for students and teachers interested in pursuing these issues further. Two recent books provide the best brief introduction to the war at home. Allan M. Winkler's Home Front, U.S.A.: America during World War II, 2d ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000) deals with the economic, social, and political effects ofthe struggle and argues that the war was a watershed that laid the framework for the postwar years. John W. Jeffries's Wartime America: World War 11 Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) likewise offers a clear overview ofthe changes that occurred but suggests that continuities with the past were equally impor tant and argues that basic American values survived the conflict intact. Both of these books contain full bibliographies of all the recent scholarship. Other books help fill out the picture. William L. O'Neill's A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War 11 (New York: Free Press, 1993) offers a good overview of all sides ofthe struggle. two best books from the 1970s, still useful today, are Richard Polenberg, War and Society: United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia:J.B.Lippincott Company, 1972); and John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Polenberg provides an evenhanded and useful assessment of the important wartime developments. Blum in cludes a fuller sense of the culture and its constraints in his more extended account. Two other older works that are likewise still helpful are Richard R. Lingeman, Dont You Know There s a War On? American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970); and Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: American People, 1939-1945 (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geohegan, 1973). Lee Kennett's For the Duration: United States Goes to War, Pearl Harbor-1942 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985) published more recently, exam ines the first six months of the struggle. Anthologies that can be used to supplement the above works include: Richard Polenberg, ed., America at War: Home Front, 1941-1945 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Chester E. Eisinger, ed., 1940s: Profile of a Nation in Crisis (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969); and the much more recent Mark P. Parillo, ed., We Were in the Big One: Experiences of the World War II Generation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002). On the issue of whether the struggle was a good war, see Studs Terkel, uThe Good War1: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Paul Fussell paints a much more devastating picture of the impact of the conflict in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Richard Polenberg, who authored one ofthe best early analyses ofthe homefront experience in 1972, returned to the subject twenty years later in The Good War? A Reappraisal of How World War II Affected American Society published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992). In this latter essay, he focuses less on the positive accom plishments of the struggle and more on the way the war narrowed individual freedom and reinforced conservative tendencies in all areas of American life. On Franklin D. Roosevelt, such a dominant figure during the war, there is a vast literature. A number of the standard books