American Soldiers Research Articles

The COVID-19 Conundrum

The COVID-19 Conundrum

Special relationships: romance, race, and the friendly invasion in film and television, 1941–1996

The story of the wartime ‘friendly invasion’ by American soldiers has been a staple of British popular culture since at least the end of the Second World War. Transatlantic love affairs and sexual encounters between Americans and Britons during this invasion were central to the origins—and lived experience—of the ‘special relationship’. This article assesses how such events and episodes have been re-imagined in post-war popular culture. By examining various films, novels and television series from the 1940s to the 1990s, it explores how cultural representations of the ‘friendly invasion’—and especially of Anglo-American romance—have played an important role in mediating the discourses, disputes and shifting realities of contemporary Anglo-American relations. In doing so, the article contributes to on-going work interrogating anew the cultural history of the special relationship.

Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era

This paper recounts American economic history for 60 years after World War II. The unusual part of this paper is that it focuses on not only the conventional tale, but also recounts what whites did to and for Blacks over this period. It starts from the unhappy experience of a Black American soldier, goes through the prosperity that followed the war and ends with the various changes that happened to the economy after 1970. The Civil Rights Movement is in the middle, and it gave rise to more Black education before racial segregation destroyed their gains. Some Blacks graduated from college and became a Black Elite. Obama’s election showed that the Black Elite could interact with relative equality with educated whites.

Why the atomic bombing of Hiroshima would be illegal today

ABSTRACT The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.

Beyond Reality and Fiction: William Demby’s Congo vivo

Set during the height of the Congolese Civil War (1960-1965), Congo vivo (Giuseppe Bennati, 1962), narrates the affair between an Italian journalist, Roberto (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Annette (Jean Seberg), the wife of a Belgian diplomat. The film was co-written by William Demby (1922-2013), a novelist, journalist, translator, and screenwriter, who like many African American soldiers who arrived in Italy during World War II as part of the U.S. Allied Forces, remained in the country for the better part of forty years. Written during Demby's period of intermittent expatriatism between the United States and Italy, and in the same period as his signature novel, The Catacombs (1965), I argue Congo vivo, a hybrid film with elements of documentary, ethnography, and narrative fiction, is situated within a transnational and transmedia framework and offers another perspective on Italian Third Worldism. I also argue that Congo vivo anticipates the filone films set within former colonial territories that index not only the decline of the Italian film industry and the rise of television, but also an emergent postcolonial condition.

Geoffrey Wawro, Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers who Defeated Germany in World War I

Geoffrey Wawro, <i>Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers who Defeated Germany in World War I</i>

A “Monument to the American and Filipino Alliance for Freedom”: The Pacific War Memorial and Second World War Remembrance

The Pacific War Memorial on Corregidor Island in the Philippines was erected by the United States government to commemorate Filipino and American soldiers who had lost their lives during the Second World War. Inaugurated in 1968, it was the first American memorial on Philippine soil since the United States had recognized the Philippines as an independent country in 1946, following almost fifty years of colonial rule. This article interprets the monument and the wider Corregidor memoryscape. It examines how the United States, the Philippines and the Second World War are depicted both within and around the memorial and what this suggests about the creation and persistence of colonial memory. The article explores the tensions between colonial and decolonized remembrance, and the extent to which the Pacific War Memorial serves as a historical marker for the United States’ achievements in the Philippines.

Brief Mention

Other| June 01 2020 Brief Mention American Literature (2020) 92 (2): 416–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267972 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Brief Mention. American Literature 1 June 2020; 92 (2): 416–422. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267972 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture. By Allison M. Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2019. ix, 208 pp. Cloth, $45.00; e-book available.Scholarship on the Civil War tends to either overemphasize canonical authors or stress the significance of “abstraction, disembodiment, reconciliation, and silence.” Taking a different tack, Johnson focuses on the war-forged human forms that memorialized and mediated internecine trauma in the vernacular discourse of periodicals, visual illustrations, diaries, and correspondences. Evidencing the “corporeal consequences” of mass violence for US political, social, and cultural identity, Johnson sorts these “disruptive bodies” into case study–based chapters that consider female personifications of the cause, “battle-tested African American soldiers,” amputee veterans, and women (metaphorically) wounded on the home front.Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War. By James A. Davis. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 2019. xxvi, 358 pp. Cloth,... You do not currently have access to this content.

“American Homespun Fascists”: Seán O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre

This article explores four works produced by the American Negro Theatre (ANT) for stage and radio between September 1945 and July 1946 – Arthur Laurents’s The Face (1945), Samuel J. Kootz’s Home Is the Hunter (1945–46), Erik Barnouw’s The Story They’ll Never Print (1946), and Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1946) – arguing that they collectively constitute a coherent, if uneven, set of responses to what ANT co-founder and director Abram Hill had called in September 1945 “one of the most pressing questions facing the world today: What is the reaction of the returning Negro GI to his land of democracy?” This essay identifies the interrelatedness of these four works and draws on archival sources to pay close attention to the production of Juno (which has never previously been discussed at length or in connection with the ANT’s other returning veteran dramas). Analysing the ANT’s Juno as an oblique “returning Negro soldier drama” that critically retools what Judith Smith terms “trading places” stories of the immediate post-war years, this essay further contends that the company trod a fine line between an explicit and an implicit critique of the United States, protesting against “American homespun fascists” and asserting the ordinariness of African American soldiers. While this strategy sometimes risked opacity, it invited astute audiences to make connections that were inferred rather than asserted and thus circumvented accusations of anti-Americanism.

Global Dialysis Perspective: Japan.

Hemodialysis therapy was first performed in Japan at United States military base hospitals during the Korean War (1950–1953) to treat injured American soldiers with crush syndrome transferred from the combat zone. Encouraged by such experiences, several university hospitals started to offer acute hemodialysis treatment in 1955 and chronic hemodialysis treatment in the early 1960s. The health insurance program started to cover chronic hemodialysis treatment in 1967. Initially, the costs were not fully covered by the program: a 30% to even 50% copayment was required for patients who were not beneficiaries of the public insurance plan. In 1972, the national government started a program that also covered copayment on the basis of the Basic Act for Persons with Disabilities as a result of lobbying activities by patient groups and academic societies. Since then, hemodialysis treatment has become almost free of charge, except for high-income patients (up to 20,000 Japanese Yen [JPY] or approximately United States $200 per month). Typically, the total monthly cost for a patient on maintenance dialysis is approximately 320,000 JPY or approximately United States $3000, excluding any additional fees or medications. The cost consists of the medical management fee, including routine laboratory tests (22,500 JPY per month), and technical fees (21,400 JPY × approximately 14/mo). The reimbursement system is updated every 2 years. In April 2006, the costs for erythropoiesis-stimulating agents were bundled with the technical fees of hemodialysis and with anticoagulant and normal saline for rinsing. Roxadustat has recently been approved and bundled. According to the recent annual report of the Japanese Society for Dialysis Therapy Renal Data Registry (JRDR) (1), a total of 334,505 patients (2640.0 per million people in the general population) are receiving dialysis treatment in Japan as of 2017. In 40,959 incident patients (323 per million people in the general population), the average …

Adaptation and Survival in the Civil War: The Experiences of a German American Soldier

Adaptation and Survival in the Civil War: The Experiences of a German American Soldier

New vintage – new history? The sukajan (souvenir jacket) and its fashionable reproduction

This article traces the sukajan’s journey from military souvenir to fashion statement. Originally embroidered by the Japanese for American soldiers in Occupied Japan, the sukajan, or souvenir jacket, went on to commemorate further tours of duty, including the Vietnam War. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was worn as an act of defiance by members of subcultures both inside and outside Japan, developing connotations of rebellion. Its visibility in media culture further popularized this garment. The sukajan’s historic associations with military conflict and subculture style, as well as identification with Japanese craftsmanship, made it ideally suited for new vintage production, a growing trend in the fashion industry. The design, branding and marketing of new vintage sukajan drew on these associations to add gravitas to this mass-manufactured garment. Despite its ubiquity, it has received little critical investigation. This article brings the history of this neglected garment to light, and also contributes to debates around the commodification of youth subculture style and military chic. Through an examination of the materiality of the sukajan as it moves between cultures, through time and across space, it further demonstrates how such a study can disrupt the Eurocentrism that continues to plague fashion studies and can contribute to an enriched discussion of imitation, transformation and identity in moving between the global and local. Finally, this article asks: what are the implications of co-opting a garment originating in the brutal militaristic struggles between nations and cultures, sanitizing this history and selling it as fashion?

(Re)mapping the Yanggongju and the Camptown in Shin Sang-ok's Hellflower

The Korean War (1950–53) changed the material and affective landscape of the Korean peninsula and ushered in a new era ruled by a military dictatorship dependent on US military power. With bases dotting the South Korean peninsula, former agricultural villages became camptowns that catered to the needs of American soldiers. This article focuses on the South Korean melodrama Chiokhwa (Hellflower, 1958), directed by Shin Sang-ok, which narrates a love triangle between two brothers and Sonya, a camptown prostitute or yanggongju. It examines the role of the postwar environment in constructing the spaces of the subject. Using the yanggongju figure as a technology of postwar memory, this work reevaluates the ecology of ruination left in the wake of the Korean War—as portrayed through Sonya, scenes of the city, the camptown, the base, and the surrounding fields and marshes—to explore the sense of loss and displacement of this period.

Why they fought: the initial motivations of German American soldiers who fought for the Union in the American Civil War

ABSTRACTGerman immigrants who came to the American North prior to 1861 volunteered en masse once the Civil War began, and they became the largest group of foreign fighters in the Union Army during the war. The initial motivations of German immigrant soldiers in the Union Army have been misunderstood by many historians who look at Germans as Hessian mercenaries in the Union ranks – who fought purely for money –and historians who focus too heavily on the failed 1848 German Revolution as the basis of German immigrant involvement in the war. Both answers are correct to some degree, but neither fully explains the initial motivations of 190,000 German immigrants and 56,000 German Americans who volunteered to fight for the Union. This paper asks the question: what were the initial motivations of German immigrants who fought for the Union? The answer is much more complex than any one historian has presented prior, and only by exploring the full range of their initial motivations can we understand their sustained motivations for remaining in the Union Army.To demonstrate its argument, the paper utilizes sources ranging from English- and translated German to English-language newspapers, personal letters, soldiers’ memoir s and manuscripts in American archives. The paper traces German soldiers in the army from 1861 through the entirety of the war, and it explores the significance of their reenlistment in 1864. It concludes that German immigrant soldiers’ commitment to the Union was rooted in numerous intertwined situations that existed in the years prior to and during the American Civil War, especially their desire for liberty and a new home.

Creating a “Home Away from Home”: Korean Women’s Performances of the Imaginary American Home at US Military Clubs in South Korea, 1955–64

Abstract This article considers the proliferation of Korean native camp shows and the roles of Korean women entertainers at the military service clubs of the Eighth United States Army in Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s. The role of the “American sweethearts” in USO camp shows—to create a “home away from home” and boost the morale of the American troops during wartime—was carried out by female Korean entertainers in the occupied zone at a critical moment in US-ROK relations during the Cold War. The article argues that Korean entertainers at military clubs were meant to perform the entertainment of “home” and evoke nostalgia for American soldiers by imitating well-known American singers and songs. However, what they performed as America was not simply the reproduction of American entertainment but often a manifestation of their imagination; they were constructing their own version of the American home. Their hybrid styles of American performance were indicative of how the discourse of the American home itself was constructed around ambivalence, the very site where women entertainers were enabled to exceed the rigid boundaries of race and gender, transcend their roles as imitators, and exercise their agency by productively negotiating this ambivalence.

Roads to American Empire: U.S. Military Public Works and Capitalist Transitions, 1898–1934.

AbstractBetween 1898 and 1934, in synchronous and successive U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, American soldiers made public works, and especially roads, into a global technology of imperial power. This essay examines infrastructure as a factor in state formation and capitalist transition in these five different imperial spaces as a way to study U.S. empire, and its effects on foreign societies, through a comparative, global, and intra‐imperial approach often precluded by the methodological nationalism of historical and sociological literatures. Despite significant differences between these sites of U.S. war and occupation, both prior to American interventions and during them, U.S. military public works expressed and advanced a common political‐economic logic of state centralization and capital accumulation. Colonial and post‐colonial political institutions and political economies, the strength of central governments, the extent of plantation agriculture and rural proletarianization, world commodity markets, and geography and natural events varied, but determined U.S. imperial infrastructure's outcomes. By the 1930s, the U.S. military had elevated infrastructural improvement to a key repertoire of American imperial power in the world, and one which persisted as the United States turned away from formal colonialism in the era of the Cold War and decolonization.

Rehabilitating the mind: Avatar (2009), Inception (2010) and the science fiction imagining of lucid dreaming in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in the U.S. military

Transcultural psychiatry has increased awareness of alternative approaches to mental health and wellbeing, influencing developments in Western psychotherapeutic treatments. In this article, I look at the recent interest in alternative therapies by the U.S. military, which has explored the possibilities of lucid dreaming in order to help soldiers cope with the adverse mental and emotional effects of combat-commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this context of concerns about effective rehabilitation and the cost of veteran care, I examine the popular science fiction films Avatar and Inception, which have been discussed in the media as illustrations of the potential use of lucid dreaming and digitally created virtual worlds to "heal" the minds of soldiers affected by modern warfare. In these media portrayals, psychology and science fiction come together to envision and promote human-machine fantasies of the endlessly salvageable and, therefore ultimately, invincible American soldier.

"The American Soldier"'s Place in Sociological Conversations: Mapping Its Contributions in Conversations Sixty-Five Years after Its Publication

An analysis of The American Soldier (TAS) using multiple correspondence analysis and citation count analysis reveals that TAS contributed to two “uniquely distinct” conversations (methods and theory) and two “polar distinct” conversations (surveys studying group phenomena and experimental studies nested in the theory conversation). The “uniquely distinct” con­versations took place in the 1950s in the American Journal of Sociol­ogy and Social Psychology Quarterly. Nested in these uniquely distinct conversations are two “polar distinct” conversations, indicating that the methods conversation had a discernible quantitative design element, while the theory conversation included a separate discussion of experimental designs. The one non-nested “polar distinct” conversation took place in the Journal of Political and Military Sociology and in Social Forces during the mid- 1970s and resurfaced again in the 2000s. Supplementary analysis finds con­tinuing, though qualified, evidence of both the palimpsestic syndrome and the obliteration phenomenon with respect to the concept of relative deprivation.

Heavy Metal Toxicity in Armed Conflicts Potentiates AMR in A. baumannii by Selecting for Antibiotic and Heavy Metal Co-resistance Mechanisms.

Acinetobacter baumannii has become increasingly resistant to leading antimicrobial agents since the 1970s. Increased resistance appears linked to armed conflicts, notably since widespread media stories amplified clinical reports in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Antimicrobial resistance is usually assumed to arise through selection pressure exerted by antimicrobial treatment, particularly where treatment is inadequate, as in the case of low dosing, substandard antimicrobial agents, or shortened treatment course. Recently attention has focused on an emerging pathogen, multi-drug resistant A. baumannii (MDRAb). MDRAb gained media attention after being identified in American soldiers returning from Iraq and treated in US military facilities, where it was termed “Iraqibacter.” However, MDRAb is strongly associated in the literature with war injuries that are heavily contaminated by both environmental debris and shrapnel from weapons. Both may harbor substantial amounts of toxic heavy metals. Interestingly, heavy metals are known to also select for antimicrobial resistance. In this review we highlight the potential causes of antimicrobial resistance by heavy metals, with a focus on its emergence in A. baumanni in war zones.

The View of the Japanese Enemy 75 Years after the End of World War II

The View of the Japanese Enemy 75 Years after the End of World War II Kirsten L. Ziomek (bio) Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific 1944–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 711 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. After the defeat of Germany in May 1945, the United States wanted to end the war with Japan as quickly as possible. But Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio contend that this was impossible as the United States was not in the position to launch a successful invasion of mainland Japan. One of the questions that Implacable Foes sets out to answer is how the conflict arrived at the point that the United States needed to be saved by both the atomic bombs and Hirohito's intervention in favoring surrender, because the prospects of a successful U.S. invasion of Japan did not look good. The book's premise is novel in that it challenges a common narrative that the dominant United States, with all its industrial might, men, and matériel was the certain victor in 1945. The authors depict a United States government and military that still considered themselves the underdog versus the Japanese who had not won a battle since the loss of Midway in 1942. Despite the Japanese fighting a two-front war in China for eight years and for four years in the Pacific theater, with a dwindling amount of supplies, trained pilots, and resources necessary to wage war, the United States still did not like its chances in launching an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Japan had 69 cities that had already been firebombed prior to the atomic bombings, and their military had to resort to kamikaze tactics in 1944 as their primary strategy from the air out of their sheer desperation caused by their lack of skilled pilots and planes. That the Japanese posed such a formidable threat raises questions: was the United States really incapable of launching a successful invasion of Japan or was it that the government and public simply did not have an appetite for further fighting with boots on the ground? The authors argue that both are true. This substantial book is primarily focused on the American order of battle, the personalities of several "great men" like General Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall, and detailing the internal wrangling that U.S. government officials and military leaders went through when confronted with the prospect [End Page 582] of continuing the Pacific war well past the end of fighting on the European front. References to Japanese soldiers, which are relatively rare, often rely on depictions of them as fanatics who fought to the death: "[The Americans] were engaged in a war of annihilation against an enemy resigned to his own death and determined to fight on for the sole purpose of killing as many Americans as possible" (p. 8). Although the authors try to provide balance by pointing out that American soldiers—like the Japanese—also committed brutalities during the war, (pp. 77–80) brief mentions do not obviate the overwhelming sense that pervades the book that the Japanese were an enemy of a sort that American soldiers had never encountered before. Refuting John Dower in War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1987), which argues that the Pacific War was a race war that fueled hatred on both sides, the authors contend that Japanese soldiers were unique and unlike their American counterparts. "That war with the Japanese was a battle for survival, a struggle without sanctuary, came as a shock to the American soldier. Surrender meant barbaric death, to survive meant killing" (p. 79). While it is true that official Japanese military doctrine discouraged soldiers from surrendering, whether this resulted in American soldiers being less willing to fight for their lives than the Japanese is debatable. More groundwork and substantial evidence would help advance their argument against Dower's. Regardless, the book was never intended to be about the foes of America, but instead the focus was meant to be (and is) on how the American government and military officials saw their options to end the war in light of the...