War Camps Research Articles

Sub-Tribes in the Magar Community in Nepal

My purpose in this paper is to examine in the light of recent field work some of the material on the Magar tribe of Nepal,1 in particular on the problem of the sub-tribes within this community. In the literature the number of sub-tribes accorded Magar status is variable, and the authenticity of others is questioned. It is not possible to completely clarify the situation. But with data from West No. 4 and southern Baglung districts in central Nepal where there are concentrations of the tribe, it is possible to resolve some of the confusions and delineate more sharply the kind of problem which remains. A major source of information about the Magars has been British army officers in Gurkha regiments of the British Indian Army. A difficulty they faced was lack of information derived from contact with the Magars in their home country, since their studies for the most part had to be conducted in regiments and recruiting depots. (One fairly large body of data was collected in Europe in a German prisoner of war camp during the First World War by a German official.2) Another problem was the levelling effect produced by the army itself. This arose in part because informants were living in a highly standardized environment, where differences which would be maintained in the hills were smoothed away. It also was a result of the seeping back into Nepal of knowledge (real or assumed) of British standards for recruitment and advancement. In a manual published in 1944, Major H. R. K. Gibbs of the British Indian Army wrote:

In Affectionate Memory of Henry Pratt Fairchild, 1880-1956

Henry Pratt Fairchild was born in Dundee, Illinois, on August 18, 1880. He did his undergraduate work at Doane College in Nebraska, graduating in the class of 1900. The next three years he spent teaching at the International College in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey. Returning to the United States, he taught successively at Doane, Bowdoin, and Yale, taking his PhD at Yale in 1909. During World War I, he served with the War Camp Community Service, and in 1919 joined the faculty of New York University, first as Professor of Social Economy and from 1924 on as Professor of Sociology. He was Chairman of the Department of Sociology from 1938 to 1945, when he retired as Professor Emeritus. He maintained his office and his associations at NYU right up to his death.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Our Profession in Reverse

HE problems which we language teachers faced during the war in the Army Specialized Training Program and in the Civil Affairs Training Schools have already been well described. Much less known is a far smaller program in which three of us were asked to apply our usual techniques in reverse. As in the AST and CAT programs, the were soldiers in uniform, but there all similarity stopped. Instead of teaching a foreign language to American soldiers, we were to teach American English to foreigners; instead of the usual olive drab, the uniforms were motley in shape and color and had a large PW painted on the back of each shirt and on the seat of each pair of trousers; and instead of the dormitories and classrooms of a college, the campus consisted of the bare, drab barracks of a prisoner of war camp, set about with barbed wire. For these students were not Americans but carefully chosen anti-Nazi German and Austrian prisoners of war. The project at which we served was a small part of the whole reeducation program conducted by the Provost Marshal General throughout the prisoner of war camps in this country.' Our immediate objective was to train a selected few of these prisoners so that they could serve as administrative and police officials under American Military Government in their home countries. Hence a curriculum was established which included instruction in the aims, organization and methods of American Military Government and enough instruction in spoken American English to enable the prisoners to cooperate with their future employers. A much broader and, in the long run, more important objective was to strengthen these anti-Nazis' understanding of democracy; accordingly, a series of lectures and discussions was arranged on the democratic aspects of German history and on the workings of democracy in our own country. Language instruction was also expected to contribute to this larger objective since it was believed that a necessary prerequisite to acquainting with the culture of a people is to have them study its language. With our objectives thus clearly defined, the three of us in charge of language instruction set about organizing our part of the curriculum.2 We

Malnutrition and vitamin deficiency in recently released prisoners of war

The remarkable recuperative power of the human body after prolonged periods of marked systematized undernourishment is illustrated by careful physical examination of 121 American soldiers released three weeks previously from 18 different prisoner of war camps in Germany. Only one of these prisoners showed moderate undernourishment and vitamin deficiency. More than 53% showed no evidence of any vitamin deficiency clinically, and the others showed minimal evidence (one-plus) of vitamin de ficiencies to varying extents. Analysis shows that the supplementary rations furnished in the Red Cross Packages were the most important single factor in preventing serious nutritional failure in these prisoners of war.

EFFECTS OF STARVATION ON SEX HORMONES IN THE MALE

FOR many years there has been considerable interest in the relation of sex hormones to changes in the skin, sebaceous glands, hair, libido, prostatic fluid, breasts and menstruation. An immense amount of research has been completed relative to sex hormones, but much of this work has been carried out on small animals. The question has frequently arisen: “Would the results have been the same in the human?” Thirty-eight months in Japanese Prisoner of War Camps presented excellent opportunities to observe the clinical effects of starvation on the sex hormones of the human. The observations are set forth in this paper, and are compared to some of the results of experiments which have been carried out on small animals by various investigators. During the few months on Bataan and Corregidor, the slim diet of rice and fish had been cut to half-rations, and finally to quarter-rations. Many of the front-line troops went for days without food. When the Fil-American Forces surrendered during April and May of 1942, many vitamin deficiency diseases were already well established. Then came the “Death March” from Bataan to Camp O'Donnell without food, and with only the little water that could be sneaked from the ditches alongside the road, when the Japanese guards were not watching.

PERONEAL PALSY BY CROSSING THE LEGS

<h3>To the Editor:—</h3> The article inThe Journal, March 15, by Majors Nagler and Rangell dealing with "Peroneal Palsy Caused by Crossing the Legs" brings to mind an interesting experience while I was serving at Borden General Hospital, Chickasha, Okla. In mid-July 1945 the hospital neurologist and I were assigned to investigate an outbreak of "paralysis" in a German prisoner of war camp at Alva, Okla., where some 5,000 Germans were maintained in four compounds (one officer, two noncommissioned and one enlisted man). During the months of June and July about 35 cases of peroneal palsy, chiefly unilateral, erupted in the officer and noncommissioned officers' compounds but spared the enlisted one. The main distinguishing feature between these groups was the fact that the enlisted men worked in the camp and neighboring farms while the other groups were inactive. A constant finding was weight loss ranging from 10 to 25 pounds

Mental Disorder in Released Prisoners of War

After the cessation of hostilities with Japan some 60,000 Europeans were released from Prisoners of War Camps in territory under Japanese control. Of these, a high proportion were sick and were admitted to hospital. Nearly all the psychiatric cases among them were admitted to the 41 British General Hospital, Hospital Town East, Jalahalli. These cases admitted to this hospital were 60 in number, and of them 50 were considered psychotic, 6 neurotic, and in 4 no gross psychiatric disability was found. In order, adequately, to assess the significance of this incidence of mental disorder in the prison camps, a brief résumé of the conditions of imprisonment and of the state of the cases admitted to general medical wards is considered essential.

Nutritional Experiences in Prisoner of War and Internment Camps 1n the Far East

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The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp

AFTER allowance has been made for abnormal circumstances, the social institutions, ideas and habits of groups in the outside world are to be found reflected in a Prisoner of War Camp. It is an unusual but a vital society. Camp organisation and politics are matters of real concern to the inmates, as affecting their present and perhaps their future existences. Nor does this indicate any loss of proportion. No one pretends that camp matters are of any but local importance or of more than transient interest, but their importance there is great. They bulk large in a world of narrow horizons and it is suggested that any distortion of values lies rather in the minimisation than in the exaggeration of their importance. Human affairs are essentially practical matters and the measure of immediate effect on the lives of those directly concerned in them is to a large extent the criterion of their importance at that time and place. A prisoner can hold strong views on such subjects as whether or not all tinned meats shall be issued to individuals cold or be centrally cooked, without losing sight of the significance of the Atlantic Charter. One aspect of social organisation is to be found in economic activity, and this, along with other manifestations of a group existence, is to be found in any P.O.W. camp. True, a prisoner is not dependent on his exertions for the provision of the necessaries, or even the luxuries of life, but through his economic activity, the exchange of goods and services, his standard of material comfort is considerably enhanced. And this is a serious matter to the prisoner: he is not playing at shops even though the small scale of the transactions and the simple expression of comfort and wants in terms of cigarettes and jam, razor blades and writing paper, make the urgency of those needs difficult to appreciate, even by an ex-prisoner of some three months' standing. Nevertheless, it cannot be too strongly emphasised that economic activities do not bulk so large in prison society as they do in the larger world. There can be little production; as has been said the prisoner is independent of his exertions for the provision of the necessities and luxuries of life; the emphasis lies in exchange and the media of exchange. A prison camp is not to be compared with the seething crowd of higglers in a street market, any more than it is to be compared with the economic inertia of a family dinner table. Naturally then, entertainment, academic and literary interests, games and discussions of the other world bulk larger in everyday Life than they do in the life of more normal societies. But it would be

Hostile French Civilians

As the Germans retreated from French cities they left behind them a considerable number of spies and snipers to hamper the advance of the Allied armies. Though these enemy agents wore civilian clothes and generally spoke fluent French they were part of the regular German army, and could be treated by our military authorities in accordance with well-established military precedent. French nationals believed to be in the pay of the Germans were turned over to the Fighting French forces of General De Gaulle for trial and punishment by courts martial. Whenever spies or snipers who were not French nationals were apprehended by Allied Intelligence officers, military police, soldiers, or by French civilian patriots, they were turned over to British or American military tribunals. The initial place of confinement depended upon the site of apprehension, and transfer was made to regular Prisoner of War camps as soon as the military situation permitted. At the Prisoner of War camps segregation was immediately instituted, and the prisoner committed to regular legal process in accordance with military law. This procedure was not novel, and did not in any way differ from similar situations in previous wars or in other theatres of operation. However there were many individuals of French nationality who were not in the pay of the Nazi military machine yet who committed acts which injured the Allied cause. These hostile French civilians, whether motivated by fear, finance, or Fascist belief, presented a new problem for Allied law-enforcement authorities. Collaborating with the Germans was not a crime. French civilians who obeyed German orders and complied with German demands could not be regarded as violators of any legal precept, even though they collaborated without reluctance. However in very many cases of collaboration there were additional acts which made the transgression more than morally reprehensible, and these illegalities brought the arrest of the responsible individuals. Among the political crimes committed by the French against their own administration Denunciation was the most common. It was a method of intimidation. A letter addressed to the local Gestapo chief naming certain persons as members of the underground, as owners of secret radios, or as being the perpetrators of certain acts of sabotage, brought immediate reprisals. The.

A ‘Communitarian’ State

During 1942 a treatise, written, printed and edited in a French prisoners of war camp in Germany was then circulated in France through the agency of repatriated compatriots. It was the first of a series to be known as Les Cahiers des Captifs composed by Frenchmen whose enforced captivity had led them to alter or modify their pre-war views regarding government. One of these volumes is entitled Les Fondements de la Communauté Française—an attempt to outline the composition, function and powers of a State based on what may be called ‘communitarian’ principles. The treatise is divided into two sections, the first part dealing with basic principles and the second part with their organic applications.In this article I make no attempt to transcribe the detailed working out of the plans proposed, but only to give the main reflections of this prisoner of war who believes firmly in the resurgence of his country provided she can achieve that national solidarity and cohesion she came so near losing.To-day France is ripe for a new venture, and yet what she needs is to restate the old ideal which at bottom has always been treasured by the French people in all epochs of their history, at first instinctively, and then consciously—the ‘Communitarian ideal.’ In the 19th century France made the mistake of trying to restore a merely traditional past followed by the other mistake of transposing on to her soil institutions which were alien to her history, her national temperament and her genius.

Book Review: Prisoners' Quest. A Presentation of the Christian Faith in a Prisoners of War Camp

Book Review: Prisoners' Quest. A Presentation of the Christian Faith in a Prisoners of War Camp

Community Organization for War and for Peace

ANY period of war is necessarilv a more or ti less revolutionary era. Movements and tendencies already under way are speeded up and new ones develop to meet new conditions. There is a conflict between the status quo ante and the pressure to meet vital needs in a new way. This has been well brought out by Kenneth Roberts in his story, Oliver Wiswell, in which he holds that the American Revolution was as much a revolution of the lower and middle classes against the tories as against England. The first World War brought about a general awakening to the need for community organization. From small beginnings of using the school as a social and civic center in the first decade of this century, there had grown up a strong community center movement which held its first national conference in 'Chicago in 1916 under the leadership of John Collier. It formed the National Community Center Association which did much to spread its gospel through its monthly publication, The Community Center, during the next eight years of its existence, when it was absorbed into the National Education Association.1 When this country entered the war in 1917 Congress established the system of national, state and county councils of defense through which all civilian war activities cleared. Through the influence of some of the leaders in the community center movement this system was carried down to the local community, and just before the Armistice was declared a vigorous campaign was under way for organizing community councils to carry on civilian war activities.2 With peace these quickly dissolved, but the need for coordination between the efforts of various voluntary organizations had been demonstrated and the feeling of identity with a local community had been aroused as never before. Other movements for community organization also arose during the war and have had more lasting influence. Due to the many drives for funds for war activities, war chests were formed in large numbers of cities, which were later transformed' into community chests, so that we now have a wellestablished system of privately supported community chests and councils for the support of private philanthropic and character-building agencies, and for the study and coordination of programs of social work. War Camp Community Service, which had provided recreation centers for the men in service during the war, became Communily Service, Inc. and for a few years made a vigorous campaign for erecting community buildings for social and recreational centers as war memorials, which did much toward fostering community identification and providing better facilities for organizations devoted to the 4eneral community welfare. Although the Smith-Lever Act for extension work in agriculture and home economics had been passed in 1914, it was the need for food production

MEASLES AND ITS ALLIES

War camp statistics are surprising in the evidence they afford that the camps were nurseries of carrier-borne infections and their complications. This author emphasizes the need of attention to the carrier, who is a very important health risk. Prevention here demands sanitary attention in inter-epidemic times as well as during the run of epidemics.

Community service, INC.

AbstractThe peace‐time successor of the War Camp Community Service is the new Community Service, a central bureau for installing autonomous local organizations in towns that want more wholesome and universal neighborliness in recreation.

New visions in public recreation

AbstractA review of the new utterances of various recreational experts, and the stimulating possibilities disclosed by the experience of the War Camp Community Service.

War Camp Community Service

War Camp Community Service

War Camp Community Service

War Camp Community Service

British Food Journal Volume 19 Issue 3 1917

The Daily Dispatch publishes a letter from “ One of the Guard” at a war camp, who writes as follows:—

CAMP SANITATION

Medical Journal of AustraliaVolume 1, Issue 6 p. 120-121 Laboratory Work in War CAMP SANITATION First published: 01 February 1916 https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.1916.tb17517.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume1, Issue6February 1916Pages 120-121 RelatedInformation