Who is a Lithuanian? In Search of Władysław Mickiewicz’s Motherland

Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919-1943examines the nature of the inter-Service crisis between the British Army and the RAF over the provision of effective air support for the army in the Second World War. Material for this book is drawn primarily from the rich collection of documents at the National Archives (UK) and other British archives. The author makes a highly original point that Britain's independent RAF was in fact a disguised blessing for the Army and that the air force's independence was in part a key reason why a successful solution to the army's air support problems was found. The analysis traces why the British army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support and how an effective system of support was organized by the RAF. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origins and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War. The provision of direct air support was of central importance to the success enjoyed by Anglo-American armies during the latter half of the Second World War. First in North Africa, and later in Italy and North-West Europe, American, British and Empire armies fought most if not all of their battles with the knowledge that they enjoyed unassailable air superiority throughout the battle area. This advantage, however, was the product of a long and bitter dispute between the British Army and the Royal Air Force that began at the end of the First World War and continued virtually unabated until it was resolved in late 1942 and early 1943 when the 2nd Tactical Air Force was created. Battlefield experience and, in particular, success in North Africa, combined with the hard work, wisdom and perseverance of Air Marshals Sir Arthur Tedder and Arthur Coningham, the active co-operation of General Bernard Montgomery, and the political authority of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, produced a uniquely British system that afforded the most comprehensive, effective and flexible air support provided by any air force during the war. The book is divided into two equal parts of five chapters. Part one surveys how the British Army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support, and part two explains how an effective system of air support was organized by the middle years of the war. The analysis traces Britain's earliest experience with aircraft in the Great War 1914-1918, the inter-war period of doctrinal development and inter-Service rivalry, and the major campaigns in France and the Middle East during the first half of the Second World War when the weaknesses in Army-RAF co-operation were first exposed and eventually resolved. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origin and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War.

The article is devoted to the assessment of the results of the Bolshevik modernization of Russia in the 20-30s of the 20th century in its military-technological, personnel and political aspects on the example of the struggle of Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany in the first years of World War II and the Great Patriotic War. The relevance of the topic is due to the contradictions in the assessments of the Bolshevik transformations of the 20-30s. In historiography and in the public mind, disputes about the role of these transformations for victory in the Second World War and WWII are not abating. This is especially true of the first years of the Second World War, which led the USSR to disaster. This problem was analyzed by an outstanding theoretician, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and a figure of the Russian intellectual emigration V.M. Chernov. As historical sources, the article considers a number of such interesting documents as the letter of V.M. Chernov to I. V. Stalin in 1942 and issues of the emigre magazine “For Freedom!ˮ published in the USA. Using these sources as an example, the position of V.M. Chernov on the successes and failures of the Bolshevik reform of Russia and the related victories and defeats of the Red Army in the early years of the War. It is proved that the failures of the USSR in the first years of the War were the result of a number of political and personnel problems, some of which were caused by the accelerated "assault" nature of the Bolshevik modernization of the 1920s and 1930s.

The period of the First World War and interwar years was both a watershed for women and a period of backlash against women’s achievements. This chapter examines the possibilities, paradoxes, and challenges of military women’s lives and activities in the First World War and interwar years. It addresses the service of women physicians, nurses, and women workers with the military and voluntary organizations. The chapter assesses the activities of women in revolutionary, nationalist struggles and civil war beyond the First World War years. It analyzes the roles of women in the military in the interwar years and as veterans of military institutions. In France the Service de sante militaire worked with the Red Cross and Catholic nursing orders prior to the war and so plans were in place to mobilize nurses at the start of the conflict. Keywords:first world war; military; nurses; voluntary organizations; women auxiliaries; women physicians; women’s mobilization

Ian Douglas-Wilson

Manikæernes forestilling om, at den højeste gud er skjult bag et slør indtil den yderste dag, hvor han fjerner det og åbenbarer sit åsyn, har formodentlig sin baggrund i jødedommen

This article places the historian Francis Jennings’ life in political history. Before becoming a professional historian, Jennings was a high school history teacher and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The connective tissue that bound Jennings’ high school teaching career to his career as a professional historian was not the history, but the politics. This article argues that Jennings’ experiences with Communism and anti-Communism profoundly shaped the way he understood the relationship between politics and history. Jennings the historian believed in a sharp division between academic history and political action. This perspective was a consequence of his repudiation of something that Communism and Truman-era anti-Communism had in common: the insistence by authorities—governmental and revolutionary—that politics could not be meaningfully separated from any other facet of life. Jennings’ willingness to toe the Party line and his subsequent HUAC testimony led him to see politics as a realm of lies and deceit. This led to an outlook quite different from the “radical historians” of the mid-to-late Cold War years. Rather than espouse a Marxist understanding of historical progress and conflict, or embrace post-structural or Foucauldian ideas, Jennings rejected any positive association between politics and professional history. In making this case, this article thereby complicates standard narratives about both American Communists and the “radical” American historians of the twentieth century who broke with consensus history.

David Stanley Precious (1944-2015)

The essay analizes the concept of total, partial or no adhesion to the political-economic system created by US after the end of the second world war; a system based on a sharp division between the western capitalist world and the Soviet planned economy, whose fundamental assumption was the absence of any dialogue between the two parties. The absence of dialogue also concerned their commercial and financial relations, and was aimed at avoiding any acquisition of know how and equipment by Moscow, necessary to its industrial development. If at the end of the fourties the sharp division between East and West advocated by the United States was widely shared by European allies, in the mid-fifties it would become, if not anachronistic, difficult to achieve, especially in the field of trade relations. As loudly stated by Adenauer in 1958, at the climax of Berlin’s Crisis, the Western European states continued to trade with Moscow (forgetting to say that RFT was doing exactly the same). This created the conditions for a hard and lasting dispute between Western European states and US. The main reason of this conflict was the desire of West Europeans to enter into trade relationships with Eastern European states and to improve them significantly. Italy, case study of this paper, was part of this trend, especially through its Istituto per il Commercio Estero (ICE).

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

«Based on extensive archival sources, this book provides a much-needed look behind the surface of the Imperial German state at war. In contrast to the image of a rapacious and finely tuned war machine, Kless illustrates the frictions, uncertainties, and rivalries that marked Germany’s often confused attempts to create an occupation regime in Poland.» (Dr. Jesse Kauffman, Professor, Eastern Michigan University) «Occupations are often described in terms of their consequences, with the beginnings being neglected. Andrew Kless shows how an occupation in Russian Poland came into being during a critical time in the First World War—it emerged from the ground. He therefore fills an important gap in research.» (Dr. Christian Westerhoff, Director, Library for Contemporary History (Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte) Landesbibliothek Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart) Broken Ground captures Germany’s tumultuous first year of the First World War, as it built an occupation administration from scratch between August 1914 and August 1915. Borderlands of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires became battlegrounds. The German army, struggling to maintain order in a thin strip of war-ravaged, ethnically Polish territory seized from Russia, called for the aid of bureaucrats from the German Kingdom of Prussia to form the Civil Administration for Russian Poland. With few resources, the civilian administrators relied on independent Polish citizens committees and militias to maintain order and called upon the American Rockefeller Foundation to intervene philanthropically to provide food aid. Despite these immense challenges, the enterprising administrators built an enduring occupation administration. They created new offices and departments from finance to forestry, mining to medical. They hired wounded soldiers and aged university professors and self-funded their operation through taxes and tariffs. Their growth was not a directive of Berlin but a product of their own ambition. After the May 1915 Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive and capture of Warsaw, the Civil Administration was adopted into Germany’s German General Government of Warsaw entirely. The broken ground of the first year of war guided the remainder of Germany’s occupation of Poland in the First World War. This book project was the Joint Winner of the 2020 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition for German Studies in America.

A profile of Giovanni Vidari Giovanni Vidari (1871-1934) was an Italian philosopher and pedagogist, who studied in the University of Pavia under the guidance of Carlo Cantoni and Luigi Credaro. His formation was influenced by neokantism, on which he grafted pedagogical and psychological interests; he was critical of positivism, while sharing the importance it has given to experience. After teaching in secondary school he was called to the University of Pavia, then of Turin, where he taught Moral Philosophy and later Pedagogy. He was also rector of the Turin university in the years of the first world war, in which he took an active part in patriotic mobilization and worked with the interventionist and war relief associations. Despite having begun his political activity as mayor in radical socialist councils, from about 1910 Vidari had moved toward nationalism, whose roots were in the Risorgimento patriotism, because he believed that socialism favored the disintegration of the country. After war, his relationship with fascism was difficult: he accepted it as a solution to politic and social conflicts, but criticized the Gentile reform of school and some liberticidal measures. Marginalized by the Turinese exponents of fascism for having signed, in 1925, the manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals, he took refuge in studies and teaching. In the following years he attempted however a rapprochement with the fascist regime, in the name of presumed common values, such as the Ideal, the Homeland, Humanity, making a path common to many intellectuals of his generation.

The article examines political and ideological activities in evacuation hospitals in the early years of the war on the territory of the Mordovian ASSR. This aspect of the multifaceted work of political agitators and political departments requires further study, as it remains insufficiently explored at the regional level. Particular attention is given to issues of party-political work among wounded Red Army soldiers and the forms and themes of disseminating key decisions of the country's leadership within the republic’s evacuation hospitals. The directives issued by the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army during the war period obligated both regular political workers and freelance agitators to adhere to the recommendations of the political department strictly.

This special issue on war writing consists of articles based on presentations at the War in Estonian Culture, Literature and History conference held 15–16 December 2022 at the Estonian Literary Museum. The conference focused on the question of the lasting influence and meaning of the two world wars in Estonian culture, literature and history writing. These questions were underscored by the Russian–Ukrainian war which broke out in February 2022 and which actualised memory of the Second World War, the commemoration of its victims, and a weighing of the consequences, influence and meanings of the war for different memory communities. Anniversaries of historical events that have changed world history call for new scholarly perspectives on the past. Thus, in recent years, in connection with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, studies of related topics have become more frequent, including in Estonia. The article collection The First World War in Estonian Culture (2015) is the first step toward an investigation of the representations of the First World War in Estonian culture. In these studies, diaries and letters have particular value. Surviving private letters permit a better understanding of this great war and its meaning for Estonians mobilised for it. From the perspective of Estonian history, the most significant result of the First World War was the disintegration of the Russian Empire, which made possible the birth of Estonia – colonised for centuries –, as an independent state. Estonia was one of the nation-states that emerged from the disintegration of empires. In 2018, based on the Estonian experience and in an international framework, Anu Raudsepp and Tõnu Tannberg presented our perspective on the influence of the First World War on the creation of nation-states and resultant challenges to the writing of history textbooks. Though the independent Estonian republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1918, the declaration was followed by German occupation in 1918 and the defence of Estonia’s freedom against Soviet Russia in the War of Independence of 1918–1920. The 100th anniversary of the War of Independence also inspired new scholarly research. In 2019 Tõnu Tannberg edited a collection of articles entitled The Many Faces of the War of Independence. The 100th anniversary of the Tartu peace treaty was marked in 2020 by the publication of collective research by historians in a two-volume magisterial work on the history of the War of Independence. The Second World War has been deemed the largest catastrophe in history caused by human hands, during which 60 or 70 million people perished and the destruction changed cityscapes and landscapes beyond recognition. The war reached Estonia in summer 1941 when Soviet occupation was replaced by German occupation. The war years have been represented in the works both of exile writers and writers who remained in Estonia after the war. In Estonian war literature, war poetry has a clear profile, authored by writers who fought in the Second World War on the German side and fled Estonia during the war: Arved Viirlaid, Harri Asi, Kalju Ahven, Einar Sanden, Jyri Kork, Tiit Lehtmets and Eduard Krants. Themes related to war are reflected in the prose of Arved Viirlaid, Ilmar Talve, Ilmar Jaks, Harri Asi, Heino Susi and Agu Kask. Arved Viirlaid’s central work Graves without Crosses I–II (1991, 2009, 2015) is the most popular and most frequently translated work representing the Second World War in Estonian literature. The Tartu cycle by Bernard Kangro and autobiographical short stories by Gunnar Neeme are also remarkable. In Soviet Estonian literature the representation of the Second World War was ideologically constrained; but nevertheless two noteworthy autobiographical war novels were published in the 1970s: Ülo Tuulik’s documentary novel In the Path of War in 1974 (unabridged version 2010) and Juhan Peegel’s I Fell in the First Summer of War in 1979. In addition to belles lettres our historical memory is shaped by autobiographical texts such as memoirs, life stories, autobiographies, letters and diaries, which enable the reader to gain insight into the changes that war brought to everyday life and how people learned to adjust to them. If the memoirs of former combatants have evinced the avoidance of personal points of view and preferences for the matter-of-fact style of reportage, the memoirs and other autobiographical texts of civilians are dominated by the judgments, moods and feelings of the writer as a person. Historical writing on the Second World War is diverse. If from the perspective of western European countries, the main embodiment of evil was Hitler, the situation was much more complicated for eastern European countries. Lack of knowledge of acts of violence committed during the Second World War and later repressions in the countries of eastern Europe and the disregard for international war law by Germany and the Soviet Union have had a significant impact on how the Second World War has been handled in research by historians in Europe and the United States. In most research on the Second World War matters related to the Baltic States are regarded as unimportant compared to the larger processes that took place. Nevertheless, the Baltic states were strategically important both for Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union, making the Baltic question a bone of contention among the allied countries. Over time events that happened in eastern European countries during the Second World War have come increasingly to the fore in scholarly accounts with radically different viewpoints: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) by Norman Davies, Soldiers of Memory: Second World War and its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (2011, ed. by Ene Kõresaar). The special issue on war writing contains eight articles on the topic of war, one article on a free topic, a series of translations from the publishing house Loodus, and the archival discovery section in which a letter from the First World War is discussed.

Names of cafés in Budapest in the current of history: 1914–1919 The author first describes the process of changing the names of cafés in 1914–15, in which many names referring to France and England were substituted by names referring to the countries of the Allies. The author also gives the functional-semantic classification of the new names emerged in the years of the First World War, comparing the frequency of their types with the frequency of name types in the previous period between the turn of the century and the First World War. The most important change: regarding the new names, the proportion of unmotivated names to motivated ones increased: almost half of the new names in the period are of a reminding function. Comparing the complete name stock (old + new names) of the years of the war with that of the previous period one can observe to a lesser degree a similar tendency of change. The author examines the frequency of the new names. Finally, the naming practices of the Republic and those of the Commune (1918–19) are treated. From this period only few names are known, but they are very characteristic of the era.