Posted to Germany: Early Cold War Canadian Military Policy and Its Impact on One Family's Experience.

In the summer of 1954, military surgeon Major Robert Elliott was posted to the British Military Hospital in Iserlohn, Germany, to provide medical care to Canadian soldiers, members of the 5,500-strong Canadian Brigade that had earlier been stationed there as part of Canada's commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Like many other military families, Elliott's family had to remain behind until suitable accommodation for them could be found. Based on the letters that Elliott wrote home to his wife during their eight-month separation, this article provides a glimpse of how both old and new Canadian military policies during the early Cold War period had an impact on his work and his family. The Canadian government's decision to place the Brigade under British control reflected, in part, the long-standing attachment to Britain, but Elliott was often frustrated with how imperial/colonial relations played out in the hospital setting. And the military's initial reluctance to officially allow dependents to join their loved ones overseas, a new phenomenon in Canadian military life, undoubtedly contributed to his confusion and anxiety over when family quarters would finally be finished.

Reviewed by: American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War by Jennifer Helgren Cara DeLoach (bio) American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War. By Jennifer Helgren. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Despite a theme of naïveté in the pervading post–Second World War cultural image of girlhood, Jennifer Helgren’s American Girls and Global Responsibility takes the role of girls “seriously” in the fight for global peace during the early Cold War period (1). In this exceptional study of mid-twentieth-century youth culture, Helgren provides an insightful and engaging perspective of postwar girlhood and the literature that influenced it. Explaining that a “new internationalist citizenship role for girls took root in the United States in the years following World War II” (1), Helgren expertly shows how themes of friendship, global sisterhood, tolerance, and international peace accompanied a new political space for girls outside their traditionally domestic sphere. The practical outcome of this development, she tells her readers, was an advancement of “U.S. moral authority,” subsequently contributing to “U.S. cultural, economic, and even military power in the Cold War era” (17). Helgren’s exploration of the societal role of the twentieth-century American girl provides an unusual political perspective on the popular publications for girls produced during this period, making this book an important read for scholars of contemporary children’s literature. The book explores the ways in which youth organizations and popular literature targeted girls aged ten to seventeen in order to create a generation of globally aware and politically relevant young women. Helgren provides a comprehensive and useful overview of the Atomic Age, setting the stage for her examination of girls’ international advocacy during the early Cold War. She also skillfully unearths the impact of international pen pal and relief package projects facilitated by youth organizations, highlights the media consumed by young people and these texts’ reconceptualization of Japan and Germany as allies instead of enemies, connects global compassion with consumerism in popular publications for girls, and helps explain the pushback against girls’ organizations in the 1950s from anticommunists and radical conservatives. The most interesting and relevant aspects of Helgren’s book for children’s literature scholars are her perspectives on personal correspondence between girls and the evolution of Seventeen and American Girl magazines. These investigations point toward the important implications that these arguments possess for the study of twentieth-century children’s literature. Indeed, in a brilliantly nuanced look at the pen pal relationships between girls in the United States and foreign countries such as Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Japan, Helgren shows how letter correspondence reinforced the perception of the US as the divine rescuer of its communist and war-torn inferiors. Focusing on the Campfire Girls’ letter-writing and relief package campaign “Hello World, Let’s Get Together,” Helgren proves [End Page 110] through analysis of personal correspondence that young women served an important purpose in advancing US aims abroad, “supporting international alliances and creating respect for the United States” (58). Girls often wrote about their daily activities in these letters, giving a glowing review of life in the US; Helgren explains, however, that they also used these international friendships to tell secrets, complain, and even criticize their own government. She gives the reader a glimpse into the “intimate and lengthy correspondence of Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Frank, the Jewish American daughter of a Hollywood producer . . . and Lore Petzka, a Catholic Viennese girl whose father suffered psychological wounds as a Nazi soldier on the Eastern front” (68). The unlikely friendship between these two caused Liz to explore “her anger about the war and [to clarify] . . . in her own mind the difference between civilians and leaders,” eventually resulting in Liz sending Lore honest letters about their varying political atmospheres (73). Although Liz’s letters “referred to fascism and communism together as systems that hurt people,” she also “did not accept the rigid position that Americans were ‘better dead than red,’” writing in a letter to Lore in 1961 that “I would much rather live under communism than be dead” (74). The power of these letters, Helgren shows her...

After visiting Latin America in 1950, George F. Kennan presented a report to the Secretary of State Dean Acheson on his impressions of the region and its significance for the United States in the early Cold War period. This framed much of US-Latin American relations in the early Cold War. This article attempts to determine whether a relationship can be established between notions of power attached to feminine and masculine roles in society and the power dynamics determining US-Latin American relations in this period. US-Latin American relations are analyzed from a gender perspective based on the premise that knowledge and language are socially constructed and influence the practice of diplomacy. The initial hypothesis suggests that because language conveys symbolic representations of power, that is, notions of a superior–subordinate relationship, US officials found it useful to use gender analogies and metaphors when discussing US-Latin American relations. Kennan's reports on the region as well as other US officials' documents related to US policy towards Guatemala in this period are analyzed to uncover notions of unequal power.

Canada has contributed to North American strategic defence, and been an ar- dent proponent of strategic stability, since the early Cold War. Though seem- ingly compatible, Canada's involvement in continental strategic defence and advocacy of strategic stability has been nagged by an underlying contradiction. As part of its contribution to the strategic defence of the continent, Canada has tacitly endorsed and facilitated the United States' offensively oriented nuclear strategies. Canada's support of strategic stability, however, has aimed to dis- courage offensive nuclear doctrines and the arms races they have tended to fuel. Given this contradiction, Ottawa might have decided to harmonize its policies, either by abandoning strategic defence roles that have supported of- fensive American nuclear doctrines, or by ceasing to be an advocate of strate- gic stability and strategie arms control. But this has not been the path chosen by successive Canadian government since the mid-1960s. Instead, Canadian governments have opted to accept the contradiction and pursue a two-track approach: for more than four decades, Canada has contributed to continental strategic defences that have aided offensively oriented nuclear strategies, while simultaneously vaunting the value of strategic stability and strategic arms control.Following this two-track approach has served Canadian governments well. It allowed Ottawa to protect Canada and Canadians by emphasizing the futility of nuclear war and arms races. Yet it further permitted the Canadian military to assist the United States in defending North America and in maintaining a credible nuclear weapons posture, one capable of prevailing over common adversaries during a conflict. Since each of these policies and outcomes served the Canadian national interest, Ottawa was determined to avoid developments that exposed the contradictory nature of the two tracks, or that pushed Canada to choose between its commitment to strategic defence and its advocacy of strategic stability. Canadian governments have managed to conceal this contradiction and avoid making such a choice for most of the past four decades. However, there has been one technological development, ballistic missile defence, that has routinely threatened to expose the contradiction and force Ottawa to give precedence to strategic defence over strategic stability, or vice versa. Nonetheless, in spite of the pressure exerted by BMD, Canadian governments preserved the two- track approach; the missile defence issue has not compelled Ottawa to downgrade either its existing commitments to strategic defence or its support of strategic stability and arms control. A question that remains is whether future Canadian governments will be able to preserve this dual approach when the missile defence issue arises again, which is likely to happen within the next few years.This article examines the history and future of Canada's involvement in the strategic defence of North America and advocacy of strategic stability. It begins with an overview of Canada's strategic defence and stability policies during the Cold War and post- Cold War eras, with a particular focus on the politics surrounding Canadian participation in BMD. Next, it analyzes how the government's decision to decline a formal role in BMD in 2005 represented a reapplication of the two-track approach. It concludes with a discussion of the strategic defence and stability options a future Canadian government is likely to face.BALANCING STRATEGIC DEFENCE AND STRATEGIC STABILITY, 1945-2000Canada's involvement with the strategic defence of North America began in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Convinced that the Soviet Union would soon develop atomic weapons and long-range bombers capable of striking North America, Canada and the United States began planning a joint air defence of the continent in 1946. This planning accelerated in 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic device and fielded its first intercontinental bomber. …

Reviewed by: Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 Maurice M. Labelle Alvah, Donna — Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 289. In Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965, historian Donna Alvah illuminates the ways in which us military families abroad influenced global perceptions of American diplomacy, state, society, and culture. During the early Cold War period, United States military spouses and children stationed in Western Europe and Asia sought to cultivate neighbouring support and friendly relations with local people on- and off-base. By serving as "unofficial ambassadors" of "the American way of life," these ordinary Americans buttressed local us military efforts and global, Cold War diplomatic objectives. "Families … could exercise international influence and advance diplomatic aims by representing a nonmilitaristic facet of the United States," Alvah contends. "Wives, children, and servicemen in their domestic roles as husbands and fathers could exert soft-power influence that both complemented and tempered the United States' hard-power martial presence" (p. 227). Through multiple formal and informal cultural encounters with residents of occupied and host countries, American military families exercised a friendly and "feminine" form of American global power, consequently proliferating the myth of us exceptionalism. As Washington envisioned the establishment of a new Cold War order after World War II, military officials encouraged military families stationed overseas to participate in American foreign relations by fraternizing with non-Americans. In the spirit of cultural internationalism, husbands, wives, and children displayed American leadership, generosity, and benevolence as they visibly took part in myriad local events and humanitarian causes. American servicemen, at this time, were expected to "teach" local families the fruits of democracy and American culture. Such efforts depicted American dominance in a paternalist light, as "portrayals of servicemen with children … appealed to the idea of international family ties, though always with the American men in the role of adult benefactors" (p. 57). "The frequency of familial metaphors in representing relationships between servicemen and host nationals, as well as actual family relationships," Alvah convincingly argues, "illustrates the centrality of ideas [End Page 479] about the family to relations between the U.S. military and peoples of foreign countries" (p. 60). US military wives, for their part, actively advanced global aims and participated in the Cold War by forging informal international alliances and assisting disadvantaged peoples, as well as promoting American "values." Through their "feminine good will," white American women acted as US diplomatic agents, as they "represented sincere efforts to do good for those who were less privileged than Americans, while helping to ease Americans' discomfort with and even morally justify their nation's global dominance" (p. 82). On the Pacific island of Okinawa, for instance, Marian Merritt and other US military spouses sought to assist Okinawans in their postwar recovery, protect them from peril, and obtain their allegiance to the American Cold War effort. While perceiving local residents as inferior, childlike peoples in need of American guardianship, they constructed themselves as maternal protectors. "This maternalism tries to ease the negative effects of paternalistic military control while reinforcing justifications for the Cold war domination of Okinawa by the United States," Alvah contends (pp. 168–69). In an attempt to present a more friendly and compassionate picture of the American occupation of Okinawa, military wives "sought to counteract the negative effects of the military through nurturing, intimate interactions with Okinawans while maintaining the power differential" (p. 178). Unofficial Ambassadors serves as an excellent contribution to the existing scholarship on gender in US foreign relations and American internationalism. By highlighting the agency of US military wives and children abroad, Alvah draws necessary attention to the involvement of non-state actors in American diplomacy. She fails, however, to offer a substantial discussion regarding the role of US servicemen when off-duty and their interactions with local residents. How did these husbands embrace local culture and espouse these social roles? Did they engage with host citizens in the same ways as their wives? Did they promote a feminine, non-militaristic vision of the so-called American way of life? Alvah, in addition, leads...

ABSTRACTThis article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.

During the early Cold War period, medical reconstruction accelerated in Taiwan with the valuable support of the American medical profession. A common interpretation of this medical reconstruction focused on either the Japanese colonial legacy or the American heritage from China. Both arguments, however, oversimplify the complications inherent in transforming Japanese colonial medicine to meet American criteria of medical service in early Cold War Taiwan. This article explores the confrontation and conflict that made controversial the transition from Japanese colonial medicine to American standard medicine. This review of the history of the changing medical care system in Taiwan identifies a gap between the end of formal colonialism and an invisible colonialism. A new form of colonial medicine in Taiwan unveiled the current global configuration of power and culture during the Cold War in East Asia that was both similar to and different from the historical or imperial-colonial paradigm. Finally, the article touches on some thoughts on new forms of colonial medicine during the Cold War in East Asia.

This chapter examines the politicization of young African Americans in Memphis in the early Cold War period and its intersection with the Freedom Train controversy and the 1948 elections. Focusing on the students at LeMoyne College, it looks at black youth's efforts to carve out identities for themselves as leaders in the “fight for freedom” by insisting on the eradication of racial injustice, along with their efforts to distinguish themselves from older black leaders, including those at the helm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Memphis chapter. The chapter also considers how the idea of freedom connected blacks with the historical legacy of slavery and emancipation, and finally, describes the impact of the Freedom Train controversy on the 1948 elections in Memphis.

Diplomatic histories identify an early cold war “paradigm shift” as restoring the troubled Anglo–American “special relationship.” However, an integrated analysis of Second World War and post-war Iran suggests continuity in ideologically based Anglo–American differences on the reconstruction of the postwar world economic periphery, and that this was the defining context for crucially elusive relations during successive crises to come. The Americans had embraced Iran as an exemplar of “new deal internationalism,” being as much opposed to competing British neo-imperialist political and economic models there as to Soviet encroachments. They continued to identify autonomous British policies and interests antipathetically during the early cold war period and beyond, not merely out of economic self-interest, but at crucial moments disavowing geopolitical realpolitik. This perplex also determined during future crises of British power, in Iran and throughout the Middle East, that US interests would shift to new relationships, whenever having to decide, with indigenous peripheral actors rather than neo-imperialist European allies, precluding institutionalized, comprehensive Anglo–American partnership, which Britain had hoped would preserve and extend its role as a regional power. *The author gratefully acknowledges the importance of a PSC-CUNY Research Award in funding significant parts of the archival research on which this article is based.

How did the US shape the composition of the UN Security Council during the early Cold War period? By focusing on the election of non‐permanent members to Council seats, this paper investigates what role the US played in the nomination and election of candidate countries. In doing so, the study relies heavily on US diplomatic archives since those archival materials are rich in terms of voting preferences of UN members, negotiations between the US and its allies, and Washington's intensive lobbying for candidates. Investigating contested elections from 1946 to 1964, we find that although the US had an extensive influence on determining Council's non‐permanent members, its power to influence election outcomes dramatically weakened from the late 1950s onwards. This finding has important implications for the recent literature on the UN Security Council.

During the 1940s, as part of its investigation of 'Communist Infiltration Into the Motion Picture Industry', the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] borrowed criteria for determining if a motion picture contained communist propaganda from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals [MPAPAI], a private, anti-communist organization located in Hollywood. An analysis of the FBI's interpretation of movies that featured black characters or explored racial themes reveals how the agency racialized its investigation of subversiveness in the early Cold War period. In the FBI's application of the MPAPAI criteria, blackness became synonymous with subversiveness and whiteness with Americanism. The FBI's racial project, as revealed in these reviews, is linked to its framing of the Communist threat and contrasted to the Truman administration's racial project and framing of the Communist threat

Support for Adolescents Who Experience Parental Military Deployment

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter explores further issues that divided these countries in the early Cold War period. It examines how the Japanese occupation—specifically US revisions to occupational policies in 1947—put Australia, New Zealand and the United States on uncommon ground. This analysis begins to reveal the way in which the US aimed to dominate discussions with Australia and New Zealand without giving any significant thought to opposing points of view in Canberra or Wellington. This chapter also begins to explore the impact of a continued post-war British presence in the Asia-Pacific through the ANZAM discussions. Similarly, it explores initial discussions Anglo-Australian plans about atomic bomb testing and the subsequent concerns about this project in Washington and Wellington.

Adverse childhood experiences are traumatic early life experiences that can lead to poorer mental, physical, and social outcomes. Children in military and veteran families can face unique challenges compared with civilian families. This study utilizes data from 2017–2019 National Survey of Children’s Health to examine 56,655 children living in military, veteran, and civilian families to predict the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences. Findings indicate that children living in veteran families (compared with civilian families) have higher odds of witnessing parents use violence and witnessing parents with alcohol or substance use problems. Children in military families had higher odds of divorce and lower odds of experiencing parental death. It is also noted that children living in military, veteran, and civilian families are similar across other ACEs including the incarceration of a parent, child as victim of violence, living with family with mental illness, unfair treatment because of race, and difficulty covering basics like food and housing.

The Mosaic approach has been effectively used to gather children’s voices in early childhood settings using a children’s voices framework, although research translation using these voices is less reported. This paper bridges this gap by reporting on the voices of young children from military and veteran families and the free, narrative-based resources co-created using these voices to strengthen children’s capacity to survive and thrive in these families. Children from military families can experience frequent relocations, multiple and prolonged parental deployments and heightened anxiety about the safety of the member parent. Children from military and veteran families might also experience the challenges of living with a parent who is injured (physically, mentally and/or morally). The children’s voices gathered in an initial study revealed four themes about their experiences in Australian military and veteran families, namely, (i) Department of Defence supports, (ii) communication, (iii) acculturation and ritual, and (iv) narrative. The research team worked with the affected community and partners to co-create resources that aligned with these themes. To achieve this, the team conducted an additional online survey with community members who had lived experience in military and veteran families, along with research partners and professionals who supported these families. The aim was to identify the types of resources and content they felt would best support children’s psychosocial development. The children’s voices, subsequent research data, and the literature were woven together to co-create free, online research-based educational and psychosocial resources to strengthen the coping strategies of young children from these families. This will interest those who aim for children’s voices not only to be heard but to have an impact on the world.