British World War Research Articles

Wound: creativity, the military and a sculpture inspired by faces, minds, and landscapes scarred by the weapons of war

ABSTRACT In reference to Alice Cree’s observation that the words ‘creativity’ and ‘military’ do not seem to ‘fit together comfortably’, the first section of this autoethnographic article critically explores my personal experiences and motivations as an artist working in close proximity to military culture. This creative practice-military relationship is examined in a variety of contexts, including designing war memorials, exhibiting in military museums, and actively participating in military, commemorative rituals. The potential risks – being co-opted by military agendas – and benefits – having a platform to use my creative voice to express the consequences of martial violence – are discussed. Focusing on one of my artworks, Wound (2022), the second section demonstrates the capability of creative practice to interrogate consequences of military (and by implication, state) violence. Wound is a bronze sculpture cast from an original First World War British Brodie helmet and a German Mauser rifle cartridge. By means of moulding, casting, and modelling processes, I reconfigured the original sources of armour and ammunition as a narrative site to metaphorically explore the ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ of landscapes and human faces and minds. Through the allegorical interpretation of this artwork and by recounting personal experiences related to its research and creation, I discuss my creative practice as a memory artist and explain my motivations for making artworks that explore human violence and warfare. The article surveys other examples of visual art and human violence in war from classical antiquity to the present, with particular emphasis on the First World War.

The German opposition question in British World War II strategy: interpreting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime intelligence reporting

ABSTRACT What explains the British decision not to lend significant support to the internal German opposition to Hitler during World War II? Some historians have labelled the absence of aid to the German resistance as an intelligence failure. P.R.J. Winter and others instead accuse the British government of policy failure by highlighting the excellent efforts of Britain’s wartime radio intelligence team, led by Hugh Trevor-Roper. But by closely reading the key piece of evidence in this case for intelligence success, the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, and by placing that assessment in the broader context of Trevor-Roper’s intelligence reporting through the end of the war, we argue that Trevor-Roper’s team did not lay the analytical groundwork for a shift in British strategy. Trevor-Roper neither appreciated nor conveyed to British policymakers the existence and strength of the German opposition, and he denigrated the opposition’s central hub, the Abwehr. This can be classed as a significant intelligence failure. Nevertheless, we also suggest that the intelligence versus policy failure framing of the German opposition question is something of a false dichotomy, as Whitehall’s intelligence and policy communities operated under a shared set of assumptions and reinforced each other’s beliefs about the appropriateness of British strategy.

Surface Ships: The Kriegsmarine’s Downfall During the Second World War

This manuscript details the German naval plan against the UK, and explores the statistics as well as leadership in the Kriegsmarine that prove why the German naval strategy during the Second World War was majorly flawed. Germany was a surprisingly powerful nation in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a nation under National Socialism, Germany had defeated and occupied large swaths of mainland Europe. Germany had taken control of France, Poland, Austria, and a majority of Scandinavia, as well as advancing allied interests in the area through Spain and Italy. The only problem that Germany had was the United Kingdom. As it is an island, the Germans could not employ their usual Blitzkrieg tactics, but instead made an attempt to reverse the British World War 1 strategy of starving the nation out of the war by eliminating any incoming trade. This was an even larger challenge for the Germans than it was for the British in the previous war, as the Germans had to eliminate the UK before the United States joined the war.

The Changing Landscape of ‘Labour’: Work and Livestock in Post‐Second World War British Agriculture

The Changing Landscape of ‘Labour’: Work and Livestock in Post‐Second World War British Agriculture

Shot at Dawn: Late photography and the anti-war memorial

The military executions of World War One are the subject of Chloe Dewe Mathews’s 2014 photographic series Shot at Dawn. These events—in which hundreds of soldiers were court-martialled and executed for cowardice and desertion—remain controversial, without consensus or established collective narrative. This article charts historic negotiations with the subject but also considers more recent efforts to integrate these proceedings within memorial practice. World War One remembrance activities, whilst diverse, have often emphasised sacrifice, heroism and community. Correspondingly, participation and engagement were core values in the major British World War One centenary arts project, titled 14-18 NOW, from which Shot at Dawn was commissioned. Chloe Dewe Mathews’s contribution to the programme, however, presents a photographic aesthetic of resistance to the principles of inclusivity and remembrance elsewhere embraced by the project. As such, the work challenges the consensual politics of commemoration and—through the practices of late photography, land art and performance pilgrimage—substitutes trauma and forgetfulness for reconciliation and memory.

The Battle of the Land and the Kitchen Front: Twenty-First-Century Museum Representations of Second World War British Food Rationing and Gender Roles

The Battle of the Land and the Kitchen Front: Twenty-First-Century Museum Representations of Second World War British Food Rationing and Gender Roles

Response

I felt both tremendously honored and slightly alarmed when I learned that this roundtable was being organized. I was delighted that such a stellar group of novel critics was willing to readTelling It Like It Wasn'tbut worried about their reactions to what Deidre Lynch has called the book's “deeply weird materials.” Much of the historical substance, especially the military and economic historiography, are far from our usual interests, and many of the literary texts are obscure and ephemeral. Furthermore, I passed over the opportunity to write about the best-known novels (like Philip Roth'sPlot Against America) by limiting my twentieth-century case studies to American Civil War and British World War II counterfactuals. So I worried that a panel on this eccentric book might seem merely an irrelevant interruption, especially in the context of a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies.

The Making of the Good British Muslim

Abstract This article investigates the meaning and political implications of the poppy hijab, a headscarf sporting British World War Remembrance poppies and intended to give British Muslims a new way of showing their social integration in public. Based on fieldwork with Muslims in London, I argue, however, that instead of furthering Muslims’ equitable inclusion in British society, the poppy hijab rather represents a Foucauldian “technology of the self” for them to prove that they are “good British Muslims”. As such, it reflects the unequal relations of power in society and may foster rather than lower general suspicion towards Muslims in Britain.

Faked News: The Politics of Rumour in British World War II Propaganda

The strategic use of rumour in wartime is part of the arsenal of governmental power, a self-aware political weapon. While the dissemination of misinformation, propaganda, and news has a lengthy history, it reached its pinnacle during World War Two, particularly through the attempts of the British to spread information that would undercut the confidence of enemy populations, provide hope for populations under enemy control, and support those who were working for an Allied victory. We present an account of the structure of the British propaganda machine, its operational forms, and then describe the spread of a set of active rumours. While it is difficult to determine the effects of these claims, the British believed that rumour diffusion had an important role in shaping public opinion in enemy and occupied nations.

Post-Second World War British Trials in Singapore: Lost in Translation at the Car Nicobar Spy Case

This paper is a detailed case study of the trial of Itzuki Toshio and others, one of the many war crimes trials conducted by the British military in Singapore after the Second World War. The main focus is on the communication problems encountered by trial participants during the trial. The criminal trial is increasingly viewed as today’s preferred response to wartime atrocities, regardless of the crime’s location or the people involved. Debates focus on improving the effectiveness of these trials but do not question their foundational assumptions. One such assumption of the Western adversarial trial is that the prosecution and defence are operating on a level playing field, both equally equipped to argue their respective positions at trial. The criminal trial as conceived from a Western legal tradition assumes that the accused is given a chance to publicly counter the case of the prosecution and the unfavourable testimony of witnesses. The accused is to be a participant rather than an “object of proceedings”. At the most basic level this requires participants to share the same language or be supported by adequate interpretation and translation services. The case of Itzuki Toshio and others demonstrates how participant expectations and judicial fact-finding may be frustrated when trial participants speak a multitude of languages. In this case these problems were further complicated by the trial’s broader political context. The islands where these crimes were committed played an important role in the independence strategies of Indian nationalists who sided with the Japanese during the Second World War to overthrow British colonial rule. For the British organisers of the trial there must have been high political stakes in ensuring the trial’s “success” regardless of the obvious communication problems plaguing it. This chapter also attempts to give the reader an idea of how the trial proceeded, how witnesses were called, the type of questions asked and the answers given. This trial looks very different from present-day war crimes trials. But like the trial of Itzuki Toshio and others, trials conducted in our globalised world today often involve judges hearing defendants and witnesses with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Researchers working on domestic trials have been studying problems of communication that arise in these multicultural contexts for quite some time. However, these problems have only received sustained attention of late from researchers working in international criminal law and transitional justice. This chapter thus hopes to add to the growing scholarship on communication problems in war crimes trials by demonstrating that these problems are not new. They were similarly encountered in historical trials.

Propaganda and ‘manufactured hatred’: A reappraisal of the ethics of First World War British and Australian atrocity propaganda

Following the end of the First World War, British and Australian atrocity propaganda fell into disrepute. Progressive liberal authors such as British parliamentarian Arthur Ponsonby condemned atrocity propaganda as a series of manipulative lies designed to dupe a naïve populace into supporting a morally meaningless war. However, atrocity propaganda, which focused on the abuse of Belgian women and children at the hands of German soldiers, was not all lies. Yet because propaganda had come to be regarded as a synonym for ‘lies’, very few historians from the mid-20th century onwards were willing to entertain the idea that some aspects of atrocity propaganda were truthful. Therefore, the just war elements contained in atrocity propaganda, which maintained that the British and Australians fought for the rights of small nations and the protection of non-combatants from military abuse, have not been given appropriate consideration until recently. This article contributes to the revision of Australian and British home front attitudes to the war by using atrocity propaganda as valuable primary source material, rather than merely dismissing it as lies, which to date has been the main approach of historians.

The plasma wars: a history

The plasma wars: a history

P(r)ose of Pain

P(r)ose of Pain

Analysing the language of war monuments

This paper seeks an approach for a systematic analysis of the semiotic resources used by the designers of British World War 1 monuments. Semiotic studies of monuments have emphasised on the one hand factors from outside the’ text’, in other words contextual social and political factors that lead to design decisions, and on the other hand factors within the text, as being maximally important for this — the latter characterising such visual communication, like language, as a system or code. The paper uses an assessment of an example of the latter, O’Toole’s functional analysis (1994) of sculptures, using a number of theories of the visual to draw out its limitations and point to a number of characteristics of visual communication that would need to be considered in order to carry out a satisfactory analysis.

Anglo–American Economic Diplomacy During the Second World War and the Electrification of the Central Brazilian Railway

Throughout the Second World War British and American companies competed to gain the contract for the electrification of the central Brazilian railway. The British Foreign Office used this case to establish a broader principle with the U.S. government that the conditions brought about by war would not be used by one country to gain commercial advantage at the expense of the other. While the U.S. government supported this principle in theory, this article argues that they failed to adhere to it in practice. U.S. actions in this case shed new light on the country's economic diplomacy with Britain during the Second World War.

Foxhunter and Red Rum as National Icons: Significant Equestrian Episodes in Post-Second World War British Sports History

At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, show jumper Foxhunter won Great Britain's only gold medal. A nation found solace and comfort in being identified with not Harry M. Llewellyn, Foxhunter's rider, but with the horse itself. In the 1970s steeplechaser Red Rum braved all the odds and took on increasing penalty weight poundages to win an unprecedented three Grand National victories. This paper argues that these equestrian successes saw both horses become iconic presences; they were perceived as British sporting heroes. The horse as a historic heroic presence has been with us from Alexander the Great to the Duke of Wellington. Its apotheosis might be the Charge of the Light Brigade or it – the horse – as the only survivor at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. This narrative, however, suggests that athletic horses deserve future analyses for their intriguing roles as possible key players on the historical landscape of athletics, and in the theatre of sport.

On the Question of Modernism and the "Authentic"

Vincent Sherry is Professor of english at Washington University in Saint Louis. his publications include The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (1987), Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993), James Joyce; ULYSSES (1995, 2d ed. 2004), and The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003). he has edited the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005) and several volumes on post-Second World War British and Irish Poets for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1984, 1985). he is currently writing the Blackwell biography of ezra Pound and a book-length study of english Modernism and pan-european Decadence. On the Question of Modernism and the “Authentic”

The world voyage of James Keir Hardie: Indian nationalism, Zulu insurgency and the British labour diaspora 1907–1908

In 1907–1908, the British labour leader, James Keir Hardie, made a round-the-world tour, which included visits to India, Australasia and southern Africa. The support for Indian nationalism which he expressed precipitated a major international political controversy, in the course of which Hardie came under severe attack from the Right, both in Britain and in her colonies. In southern Africa, the issue, combined with Hardie’s earlier criticism of the repression of the 1906 Bambatha rising in Natal, sparked rioting against Hardie by British settlers during his visit. This article seeks to show how Hardie’s voyage illuminates the imperial politics of its moment. Hardie’s journey demonstrates how politics in the British colonies of his era took place not within local political boundaries, but in a single field which covered both metropolis and colonies. The article is a case study which helps to illustrate and develop an argument that the white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of nationally discrete entities, but were bound together into an imperial working class which developed a distinct common ideology, White Labourism, fusing elements of racism and xenophobia with worker militancy and anti-capitalism. The current paper refines this analysis of the politics of the imperial working class by situating it in relation to the rising force of Indian nationalism in the same period, and to the changes this development generated in the politics of the settler colonies and the imperial centre. In India, Hardie forged links with the dynamic new political mobilization that had followed on the crisis over the partition of Bengal. In doing so, he entered, as an ally, into the discursive struggle which Indian nationalists were waging for self-government. By taking a pro-Indian position he antagonized the British Right. Labourites in the white settlement colonies wanted to defend Hardie, as a representative figure of British labour, but were embarrassed by the fact that Hardie’s position on India went against the grain of White Labourist ideology. In southern Africa, local leaders of British labour did opt to defend Hardie. But they did so not only at the risk of alienating their members, but also at the price of being forced into direct confrontations with anti-Hardie groupings.

Orientation to the Setting: Discursively Accomplished Intersubjectivity

This article concerns intersubjective understanding; what it is to establish a shared understanding of the conversational activity in research interviews. This discussion was inspired by interpersonal subjectivity (Mead, 1910/1978) and constitution of otherness, one of the four matrices of intersubjectivity proposed by Coelho and Figueiredo (2003). In drawing attention to the interview as an intriguing and instructive realm of inquiry for social scientists, this article assumes two objectives: (1) outlining the concept of positioning as undergirding Coelho and Figueiredeo's third element of intersubjectivity—interpersonal intersubjectivity; and (2) suggesting how this might be studied using the discursive psychological and social constructionist approach. A specific task involved for this argument is a discourse analysis of an extract taken from interviews with British World War II veterans regarding their reconciliation experiences. I will argue that intersubjectivity is interactionally accomplished as an emergent feature of the discursive practices of remembering and reconciliation.

World War II veterans, social support, and veterans' associations

People use many different coping strategies to deal with their traumatic recollections. Twenty-five British World War II veterans were interviewed regarding the ways they used social support both during the war and in the years afterwards. The findings demonstrate that social support is used in fundamentally different ways. During the war comradeship was particularly important and even fifty years after the war comrades are still a valuable resource for discussing war experiences, and dealing with the emotional content of traumatic recollections. Veterans rely on wives and families to help deal with the more physical and practical elements of coping, but tend not to discuss their traumatic memories with them. The findings show that social support is an important lifelong coping strategy for World War II veterans.