War Dead Research Articles

Sacred Space, Mourning and the War Dead in Protestant Germany, 1945–

Abstract Using the Flensburg Memorial Dispute of 1967 as a microstudy, this article explores how Germany’s twentieth-century war dead have been represented within Protestant sacred space since 1945. It highlights the central role played by church spaces in the mourning and commemoration of Germany’s war dead and the tremendous difficulties accompanying attempts to redesign these iconographies in the later twentieth century in the face of popular sentiment.

Re-opening the Royal Road: The Unquiet War Dead of the Northern Marianas Islands

This article explores intersecting experiences of landscapes of death in the Northern Marianas islands, in the shadow of brutal battles during World War II. My discussion builds upon prior work on how the human body registers personal and historical trauma. I emphasize that in East Asian and Pacific contexts, “the body” is often best understood as extending into the immediate spatial environs, to include topography, air and water flows, and floral and faunal entities. Ritual process of healing this traumatized somatized land-person continuum revolve around reworking the body-landscape matrix, reconfiguring the ontological status of those who perished under horrific circumstances.

J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead”

J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead”

The recovery and repatriation of the remains of Japanese war dead and the roles of physical anthropologists

During and after World War II, around 2.4 million Japanese died overseas. The bodies of nearly half of them are still missing as they remain in the field where they fell and have never been repatriated. The tasks of recovering and repatriating the remains of Japanese war dead started in 1953 by the former Ministry of Health and Welfare, and are now carried out by the Social Welfare and War Victims' Relief Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW). In 2016, the "Act on Promoting the Recovery of the Remains of Japanese War Dead (Act No. 12 of 2016)" was enacted. The Act designates Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 (from April 2016 to March 2017) to FY 2024 as the period of intensive implementation and stipulates that the state shall establish a process to promote the identification of the war dead. In line with this Act, physical anthropologists were employed as full-time experts by the MHLW to conduct scientific analysis on the remains in the field, and since then, they have accompanied all overseas delegations for repatriation. The authors of this paper have been sent to the sites in the partner countries overseas such as the former Soviet Union, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, and nationally to Ioto (Iwo Jima) to analyze the minimum number of individuals (MNI), ancestry, age at death, and sex of the remains. Along with the morphological investigations, DNA analyses of mitochondrial polymorphism and Y-chromosomal/autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) have been applied for estimation of the ancestry and identification of the individual. By narrowing down the possible candidates based on the historical records such as name list of the missing, if individual identification of the remains is achieved, the remains are returned to the bereaved families, and if not, they are placed in the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo to rest in peace. Also, the implementation of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analyses with next generation sequencing (NGS) for ancestry is under discussion. This paper provides an overview of the process of recovery and identification of the missing bodies from World War II in Japan.

전사자를 희생자로도 추모할 수 있는가? - 한국전쟁의 탈식민적 이해의 관점과 전사자 추모에 대한 신학적 반성

전사자를 희생자로도 추모할 수 있는가? - 한국전쟁의 탈식민적 이해의 관점과 전사자 추모에 대한 신학적 반성

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Military Identification: Identity Discs and the Identification of British War Dead, 1914-18

Following the ratification of the 1906 Geneva Convention, in August the British Army approved the design for its first identity disc which was designed to assist with the identification of dead or wounded soldiers. A 1914 decision to produce the discs from compressed fibre rather than from aluminium resulted in an inability to identify thousands of soldiers during and after the First World War and it remained a problem despite the introduction of the double identity disc in 1916, created at the insistence of Sir Fabian War, founder of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This article reflects upon the development of the British identity disc system between 1906-1916 and considers why so many soldiers became ‘unknown’.

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityRemembering World War I in America

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityRemembering World War I in America

전사자에 대한 상충하는 기억들

전사자에 대한 상충하는 기억들

The Commemoration of the War Dead in Modern Japan

AbstractThis article begins by providing an overview of research trends in the study of the commemoration of the war dead in modern Japan. Studies of the attitudes of the living towards the dead in Japan have mainly focused on ancestor worship performed by family members. The issue of the war dead and their treatment has been the subject of debate within Japanese society since the end of the Second World War. Those who were killed in action, unlike other war casualties in Japan, have been accorded privileged treatment and been enshrined in Yasukuni. Studies of the commemoration of war dead in Japan began with the Yasukuni shrine issue, but research has recently appeared that deals with various types of commemoration. The latter part of this article discusses the commemorative pilgrimages in the former battlefields in Southeast Asia by Buddhist priests during the 1950s and 1960s. By doing so it provides an alternative perspective to the overly Yasukuni-centered discussion of the commemoration of war dead and highlights the missing link between the religious sectors’ engagement with the governmental project to recover the remains of the fallen and the later pilgrimages organized by each religious group that began in earnest after the lifting of restrictions on overseas travel in 1964.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth

Counting the Soviet Union’s War Dead: Still 26–27 Million

How many Soviet citizens died because of World War II? A new estimate of the Soviet war dead is 42 million. This figure, from Russian historian Igor’ Ivlev, is at least 15 million more than the 26–27 million previously estimated by Russian demographers Andreev, Darskii and Khar’kova and widely accepted for a quarter of a century. I consider the implications of the two estimates for the Soviet demographic accounts, contrast their sources and methods, and conclude that the new figure lacks substantial foundations. On existing knowledge, the best estimate of Soviet war dead remains 26–27 million.

The Corporate War Dead: New Perspectives on the Demographics of American and British Contractors

From an obscure sector synonymous with mercenaryism, the private military and security industry has grown to become a significant complementing instrument in military operations. This rise has brought with it a considerable attention. Researchers have examined the role of private military and security companies in international relations as well as the history of these companies, and, above all, the legal implications of their use in the place of military organizations. As research progresses, a significant gap has become clear. Only a handful of studies have addressed the complex of issues associated with contractors’ demographics and lived experience. This article sheds some light over this lacuna, examining contractors’ demographics using descriptive statistics from an original data set of American and British contractors who died in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2016. The article augments our understanding of an important population of post-Fordist-contracted workforce, those peripheral workers supplementing military activity in high-risk occupations with uncertain long-term outcomes.

Numbered, Numbered: Commemorating the Civil War Dead in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”

At the height of Radical Reconstruction and US Constitutional amendment, when the fates of ex-states and ex-slaves were most insistently joined, Constance Fenimore Woolson set a story of remembrance, a story that turns a sacrificial past into a revolutionary future. First published by the Atlantic Monthly in March 1877, “Rodman the Keeper” has recently been selected by the Norton Anthology of American Literature to demonstrate for growing numbers of students how the opportunities of a tempestuous period were once imaginatively conceived. Because this story will therefore embody Reconstruction’s artistry for years to come, it is important to appreciate its historical nuance as well as its author’s surreptitious choices. Woolson set aside the open violence in Southern states, their occupation by federal troops, and the spread of the Ku Klux Klan as she focused on early 1870, the year when suffrage for African American men was constitutionally ratified. Her story thereby became a selective and widely celebrated gauge of Southern political currents after the war, as white Southerners contemplated bankruptcy and new African American citizens began exercising their rights.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity

Grave Influence: The Impact of Britain and the U.S. on Canada’s War Dead Policy

Canada is a federation, a product of British and French colonial power. However, since the mid-20th century Canada has developed an independent character, while also aligning more closely with the United States. This article will show how Canada’s policy on war dead reflect these changes. During the First World War, Canada strongly aligned with the Imperial War Graves Commission’s strict no repatriation policy. In subsequent decades, however, military losses and the ability transport and identify the dead made repatriation much more feasible. Fairly recent events have forced Canadian policy change that effectively created two policies: repatriation for military deaths occurring after 1970, which is in line with U.S. practice, and non-repatriation for military deaths that occurred prior to 1970. This double policy effectively establishes unequal treatment of the dead, which, ironically, is counter to the founding ideal of equality in the War Graves Commission’s original policy of non-repatriation.

Anzac Anxieties: Rupture, Continuity, and Authenticity in the Commemoration of Australian War Dead at Fromelles

The Battle of Fromelles in Northern France was launched in July 1916. There were 5533 Australian casualties and in the immediate aftermath of the battle, German burial parties buried Allied dead in unmarked pits and the whereabouts of some were forgotten. Recent archaeological and scientific work has resulted in the belated recovery and reburial of these bodies with a new, purpose-built CWGC Cemetery inaugurated in the village of Fromelles in 2010. This article explores the anxieties that the relatives experience during the exhumation and reburial of the dead. These anxieties are allayed, in part, by the unique commemorative culture that has developed over generations in Fromelles. This article will examine the tension between the impetus to preserve the authentic bond fostered between individuals and communities in Fromelles and Australia, and the opposing impetus for greater official recognition, and the investment of state resources, in the military heritage of Fromelles.

The Shōkon-ideology of the Yasukuni Shrine and the Funeral Urns of the War Dead

The Shōkon-ideology of the Yasukuni Shrine and the Funeral Urns of the War Dead

兵士の死をめぐる展示(近代日本における死をめぐる語りと表象,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)

兵士の死をめぐる展示(近代日本における死をめぐる語りと表象,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)

戦争死者をめぐる無縁空間と権力空間(聖地・慰霊・宗教的ナショナリズムの再構築,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)

戦争死者をめぐる無縁空間と権力空間(聖地・慰霊・宗教的ナショナリズムの再構築,パネル, 第六十五回学術大会紀要)