Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « World War, 1939-1945 – Campaigns – Fiction »

This article examines the role women played, as film-makers and participants, in the development of the documentary genre from 1930 into the wartime period. In the 1930s and 1940s, the topics of slum clearance and town planning were a preoccupation of British documentary and non-fiction cinema. This article therefore first focuses on the little-known propaganda films generated by housing charities in the 1930s. After an examination of the use of films in the campaigns for better housing between the wars, it concentrates on three films which are linked by the inclusion of filmed interviews with the poorly housed. The study starts with a re-evaluation of Housing Problems (1935) and Kensal House (1937), widely regarded as the first of the genre, placing them in the context of the housing movement. It then gives an overview of the housing issue and female documentary-making during the Second World War, as background to a case study of film-maker Kay Mander, concentrating on her end-of-war manifesto Homes for the People (1945), which saw a further development of the interview technique and presented the women's perspective in a feminist manner. This article shows that women were not only instrumental in the development of the housing documentary but that the films they made promoted a female-orientated and progressive view of housing provision and town planning for working-class people. It was a passion for social change and a growing belief in the democratisation of the image of the poorly housed that determined changes in treatment in the films of the documentary film movement.

In historical science, there are three fundamentally different approaches to the problem of analyzing "action films": 1) the study of films as one of the tools of propaganda and ideology. Such works prove that the federal government and Hollywood worked very closely, especially in the period 1939-1945, to create through films the necessary images of war, allies and enemies. 2) the study of films from a cultural perspective, where the relationship between fiction and reality, the author's approaches and concepts of directors, the influence of films on US art is at the fore. The key problems in this category are such problems as the definition of the genre of films, features of the plot, motives and semantic content. 3) the study of departments and structures that create films (primarily, the largest film studios). This direction is associated with the analysis of propaganda, but has a greater emphasis on the study of interactions within the film community.

It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or from history.–Paul RicoeurIn the aftermath of what has come to be known as Nine One One, literary texts became the last resort of consolation in a vast desert of mindless media commentary and aggressive but ultimately futile political rhetoric. The Philadelphia Inquirer promptly published email messages exchanged by four University of Pennsylvania students trying to grapple with the tragic enormity of the historical moment. For these students “[t]he old world died on Tuesday [11 Sept. 2001],” and they had to learn to live in a new reality. To make sense of this not-so-brave new world, they sought for answers in “books and literature” (“Facing”). Mass-circulated email carried messages of consolation in literary format across the cyber globe. W. H. Auden's “September 1, 1939” was reprinted in all the major newspapers and forwarded to countless e-mail accounts. The conservative columnist George F. Will quoted liberally from the closing lines of Albert Camus's The Plague. “Today's president, his rhetorical rheostat turned way up, vows that the current military campaign 'will rid the world of evil,'” observed Will with undisguised sarcasm. He countered the president's naiveté by citing Camus's allegory of the plague as the permanence of evil in the world. In the final paragraph of the novel, Camus's narrator, Dr. Rieux, muses that the plague bacillus never dies but lies dormant until its time comes to unleash its terror on an unsuspecting world once again. By invoking The Plague, Will wanted to remind his fellow Americans “who are mild in temperament and amnesiac in tendency” that for America “there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years.” The banality of this conclusion contrasts sharply with the profundity of Camus's final lines.

At the request of the editors of the Slavic World in the Third Millennium, Yury Pavlovich Gusev (born in 1939), Doctor of Philology, a well-known researcher and translator of Hungarian literature, speaks about his life and path in science. Yu.P. Gusev was born and raised in the Urals. After graduating from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, he worked for two years as a teacher of Russian language and literature in a Hungarian village in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, having perfectly mastered the Hungarian language. After post-graduate studies in the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of USSR, he became a member of that Institute and worked there until the early 1990s, rising from junior to leading researcher. A quarter of a century of his activity is associated with the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he worked in 1994–2019 as a leading researcher. Since the early 1970s, Yuri Pavlovich has been actively combining his research work with his work as a translator of Hungarian fiction, both classical and contemporary. For his merits in the field of translation and study of Hungarian literature Yu. P. Gusev was awarded prestigious state awards and prizes in Hungary. Yu. P. Gusev talks about his childhood during the war and in the first post-war years, his youth, studies at the Moscow University and his impressions of those times, his work at the Institute of World Literature and the Institute of Slavic Studies, his many trips to Hungary and communication with Hungarian colleagues. He also shares his opinion on the development of the Hungarian studies in Russia, the possibilities for further dialogue between the two cultures. The article was prepared with the support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 21-59-23002 "Soviet-Hungarian scientific relations in the field of the humanities: communication channels, intellectual presence, transfer of ideas (1945–1991)". Interviewed and prepared the text for publication by A.S. Stykalin.

THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939–1945). Part 1: The African Mirror Newsreels IntroductionAccording to Danny Schechter, when one fights a war, "there is a need to create and maintain ties of sentiment between soldiers and citizens, as well as a need for popular mobilisation and media support" (2004:25). During the Second World War the case was no different in South Africa. The Union of South Africa propaganda campaigns in all its forms were aimed at "motivating, managing, and feeding the media" - which in turn fed the nation. This was a key strategic imperative to try to build, strengthen and maintain a consensus and united front behind the war effort (Schechter, 2004:25).The significance of contemporary filmic visualisation or off-screen enactments of war experiences and their place in South African historiography of the Second World War has long been an under-researched area....

World War II (1939-1945) was the most devastating conflict in global history. The United States underwent profound economic, political, and social change as the nation mobilized for war. Millions of American men were drafted into the armed forces, creating an acute labor shortage that the government addressed through propaganda campaigns to recruit women into previously male-dominated occupations. These dedicated efforts resulted in a surge of female employment in the defense industry, noncombatant military roles, and medicine. Female workers overcame significant discriminatory barriers and challenged traditional social norms with their critical wartime labor contributions. Despite post-war efforts to remove them from the workforce, female workers brought about lasting change to the American conception of gender roles that contributed to the later rise of the second-wave feminist movement.

Ruskin Bond has grown up during an important phase of history. He was Born and brought up in India during the 1930s when the freedom struggle in India was at its zenith, World War which lasted from 1939 to 1945 and immediately after that the event of Independence and chopping up of the country, there is a certain trauma involved for the writer who was British in color and blood but Indian in his sensibilities. One of the most important questions which he tries to raise through his fiction is the “abjection “of the Anglo -Indian and English families which remained behind after the independence. The black and white world of the British Raj has been depicted in the ghost stories of Ruskin Bond which are an allegory of wrecked world of the colonizing mission of the empire. The concerns which Bond raises in these stories don’t pertain so much to the natives. These stories underline the decayed situation of the white families left behind after the Raj was over. His ghost stories are a constant reminder of empires hollowed mission in the East and what it has done to its own people.

Sexual slavery as a phenomenon of war was rampant during the Japanese Imperial Army’s occupation of territories before and during the Second World War (1939-1945). These innumerable sex slaves, or “comfort women”, as the Japanese Army had named them, were women (a striking number of them being minors) who were forcefully captured and separated from their families and placed at comfort stations built to fulfill the sexual needs of the Japanese soldiers. While this entire system was created on the pretext of reducing wartime rapes and curbing the spread of venereal diseases, these comfort stations did just the opposite. Studies conducted into these comfort stations reveal how they had become sites of inhuman sexual violence, torture, disease, and death. This paper will look at how Jing-Jing Lee’s historical fiction How We Disappeared (2019) rewrites these innumerable, nameless, brutalized women into the world’s history as victims of a bloody war that had tainted unassuming lives and had snuffed out their existence ruthlessly. Lee’s narrative is scarred by violence committed along gendered lines – illustrating the reduction of the female body to a disposable sexual tool, existing merely to bear the brunt of a war that was not theirs. This paper decodes the politics of gender violence behind Japan’s enforced and licensed prostitution, the nature of sexual violence, the commodification of women’s bodies, the place of women in the socio-cultural context of the era, and the gendered role of women, in what was quintessentially men’s war.

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. 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Follow-up correspondence. 12 May 2016.Jenkins, Wendy. “Tales from the Backlist: A Fortunate Life Turns 30.” Fremantle Press, 14 April 2011. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/bookclubs/574-tales-from-the-backlist-a-fortunate-life-turns-30>.Keesing, Nancy. ‘An Enduring Classic.’ Australian Book Review (May 1981). FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.King, Noel. “‘I Can’t Go On … I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 22 Dec. 2004; 24 May 2006.” Westerly 51 (2006): 31–54.Larsson, Marina. “A Disenfranchised Grief: Post War Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War.” Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 79–95.Lindstrom, Richard. “The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War: 1915-1939.” PhD dissertation. Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.

When the National Trust was established in 1895 its founders, Canon Rawnsley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, were, as Cannadine notes, “primarily concerned with preserving open spaces of outstanding natural beauty which were threatened with development or spoliation.” This was because, like Ruskin, Morris and “many of their contemporaries, they believed that the essence of Englishness was to be found in the fields and hedgerows, not in the suburbs and slums” (Cannadine 227). It was important to protect these sites of beauty and historical interest from development not only for what they were but for what they purportedly represented—an irreplaceable repository of the nation’s “spiritual values”, and thus a vital antidote to the “base materialism” of the day. G.M. Trevelyan, who I am quoting here, noted in two pieces written on behalf of the Trust in the 1920s and 30s, that the “inexorable rise of bricks and mortar” and the “full development of motor traffic” were laying waste to the English countryside. In the face of this assault on England’s heartland, the National Trust provided “an ark of refuge” safeguarding the nation’s cherished physical heritage and preserving its human cargo from the rising waters of materialism and despair (qtd. in Cannadine 231-2).Despite the extension of the road network and increasing private ownership of cars (up from 200,000 registrations in 1918 to “well over one million” in 1930), physical distance and economic hardship denied the majority of the urban population access to the countryside (Taylor 217). For the urban working classes recently or distantly displaced from the land, the dream of a return to rural roots was never more than a fantasy. Ford Madox Ford observed that “the poor and working classes of the towns never really go back” (Ford 58).Through the later nineteenth century the rural nostalgia once most prevalent among the working classes was increasingly noted as a feature of middle class sensibility. Better educated, with more leisure time and money at their disposal, these sentimental ruralists furnished a ready market for a new consumer phenomenon—the commodification of the English countryside and the packaging of the values it notionally embodied. As Valentine Cunningham observes, this was not always an edifying spectacle. By the late 1920s, “the terrible sounds of ‘Ye Olde England’ can already be heard, just off-stage, knocking together its thatched wayside stall where plastic pixies, reproduction beer-mugs, relics of Shakespeare and corn-dollies would soon be on sale” (Cunningham 229). Alongside the standard tourist tat, and the fiction and poetry that romanticised the rural world, a new kind of travel writing emerged around the turn of the century. Through an analysis of early-twentieth century notions of Englishness, this paper considers how the north struggled to find a place in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927).In Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901), the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, described a journey through “Old England” as a cultural pilgrimage in quest of surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity, “or so much of it as is left” (Austin 18). Austin’s was an early example of what had, by the 1920s and 30s become a “boom market … in books about the national character, traditions and antiquities, usually to be found in the country” (Wiener 73). Longmans began its “English Heritage” series in 1929, introduced by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, with volumes on “English humour, folk song and dance, the public school, the parish church, [and] wild life”. A year later Batsford launched its series of books on “English Life” with volumes featuring “the countryside, Old English household life, inns, villages, and cottages” (Wiener 73). There was an outpouring of books with an overtly conservationist agenda celebrating journeys through or periods of residence in the countryside, many of them written by “soldiers like Henry Williamson and Edmund Blunden, who returned from the First War determined to preserve the rural England they’d known” (Cunningham 229; Blunden, Face, England; Roberts, Pilgrim, Gone ; Williamson). In turn, these books engendered an efflorescence of critical analyses of the construction of England (Hamilton; Haddow; Keith; Cavaliero; Gervais; Giles and Middleton; Westall and Gardiner).By the 1920s it was clear that a great many people thought they knew what England was, where it might be found, and if threatened, which parts of it needed to be rescued in order to safeguard the survival of its essential identity. By the same point, there were large numbers who felt, in Patrick Wright’s words, that “Some areas of the nation had been lost forever and in these no one should expect to find the traditional nation at all” (Wright 87).A key guide to the nation’s sacred sites in this period, an inventory of their relics, and an illustration of how its lost regions might be rescued for or erased from its cultural map, was provided in H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927). Initially published as a series of articles in the Daily Express in 1926, In Search of England went through nine editions in the two and a half years after its appearance in book form in 1927. With sales in excess of a million copies, as John Brannigan notes, the book went through a further twenty editions by 1943, and has remained continuously in print since (Brannigan).In his introduction Morton proposes In Search of England is simply “the record of a motor-car journey round England … written without deliberation by the roadside, on farmyard walls, in cathedrals, in little churchyards, on the washstands of country inns, and in many another inconvenient place” (Morton vii). As C.R. Perry notes, “This is a happy image, but also a misleading one” (Perry 434) for there was nothing arbitrary about Morton’s progress. Even a cursory glance at the map of his journey confirms, the England that Morton went in search of was overwhelmingly rural or coastal, and embodied in the historic villages and ancient towns of the Midlands or South.Morton’s biographer, Michael Bartholomew suggests that the “nodal points” of Morton’s journey are the “cathedral cities” (Bartholomew 105).Despite claims to the contrary, his book was written with deliberation and according to a specific cultural objective. Morton’s purpose was not to discover his homeland but to confirm a vision that he and millions of others cherished. He was not in search of England so much as reassuring himself and his readers that in spite of the depredations of the factory and the motor vehicle, it was still out there. These aims determined Morton’s journey; how long he spent in differing parts, what he recorded, and how he presented landscapes, buildings, people and material culture.Morton’s determination to celebrate England as rural and ancient needed to negotiate the journey north into an industrial landscape better known for its manufacturing cities, mining and mill towns, and the densely packed streets of the poor and working classes. Unable to either avoid or ignore this north, Morton needed to settle upon a strategy of passing through it without disturbing his vision of the rural idyll. Narratively, Morton’s touring through the south and west of the country is conducted at a gentle pace. In my 1930 edition of the text, it takes 185 of the book’s 280 pages to bring him from London via the South Coast, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Welsh marches, to Chester. The instant Morton crosses the Lancashire border, his bull-nosed Morris accelerates through the extensive northern counties in a mere thirty pages: Warrington to Carlisle (with a side trip to Gretna Green), Carlisle to Durham, and Durham to Lincoln. The final sixty-five pages return to the more leisurely pace of the south and west through Norfolk and the East Midlands, before the journey is completed in an unnamed village somewhere between Stratford upon Avon and Warwick. Morton spends 89 per cent of the text in the South and Midlands (66 per cent and 23 per cent respectively) with only 11 per cent given over to his time in the north.If, as Genette has pointed out, narrative deceleration results in the descriptive pause, it is no coincidence that this is the recurring set piece of Morton’s treatment of the south and west as opposed to the north. His explorations take dwelling moments on river banks and hill tops, in cathedral closes and castle ruins to honour the genius loci and imagine earlier times. On Plymouth Hoe he sees, in his mind’s eye, Sir Walter Raleigh’s fleet set sail to take on the Armada; at Tintagel it is Arthur, wild and Celtic, scaling the cliffs, spear in hand; at Buckler’s Hard amid the rotting slipways he imagines the “stout oak-built ships which helped to found the British Empire”, setting out on their journeys of conquest (Morton 39). At the other extreme, Genette observes, that narrative acceleration produces ellipsis, where details are omitted in order to render a more compact and striking expression. It is the principle of ellipsis, of selective omission, which compresses the geography of Morton’s journey through the north with the effect of shaping reader experiences. Morton hurries past the north’s industrial areas—shuddering at the sight of smoke or chimneys and averting his gaze from factory and slum.As he crosses the border from Cheshire into Lancashire, Morton reflects that “the traveller enters Industrial England”—not that you would know it from his account (Morton 185). Heading north towards the Lake District, he steers a determined path between “red smoke stacks” rising on one side and an “ominous grey haze” on the other, holding to a narrow corridor of rural land where, to his relief, he observes men “raking hay in a field within gunshot of factory chimneys” (Morton 185-6). These redolent, though isolated, farmhands are of greater cultural moment than the citadels of industry towering on either side of them. While the chimneys might symbolise the nation’s economic potency, the farmhands embody the survival of its essential cultural and moral qualities. In an allusion to the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea from the Book of Exodus, the land that the workers tend holds back the polluted tide of industry, furnishing relief from the factory and the slum, granting Morton safe passage through the perils of modernity and into the Promised Land–or at least the Lake District. In Morton’s view this green belt is not only more essentially English than trade and industry, it is also expresses a nobler and more authentic Englishness.The “great industrial new-rich cities of northern England—vast and mighty as they are,” Morton observes, “fall into perspective as mere black specks against the mighty background of history and the great green expanse of fine country which is the real North of England” (Morton 208). Thus, the rural land between Manchester and Liverpool expands into a sea of green as the great cities shrink on the horizon, and the north is returned to its origins.What Morton cannot speed past or ignore, what he is compelled or chooses to confront, he transforms, through the agency of history, into something that he and England can bear to own. Tempted into Wigan by its reputation as a comic nowhere-land, a place whose name conjured a thousand music hall gags, Morton confesses that he had expected to find there another kind of cliché, “the apex of the world’s pyramid of gloom … dreary streets and stagnant canals and white-faced Wigonians dragging their weary steps along dull streets haunted by the horror of the place in which they are condemned to live” (Morton 187).In the process of naming what he dreads, Morton does not describe Wigan: he exorcises his deepest fears about what it might hold and offers an incantation intended to hold them at bay. He “discovers” Wigan is not the industrial slum but “a place which still bears all the signs of an old-fashioned country town” (Morton 188). Morton makes no effort to describe Wigan as it is, any more than he describes the north as a whole: he simply overlays them with a vision of them as they should be—he invents the Wigan and the north that he and England need.Having surveyed parks and gardens, historical monuments and the half-timbered mock-Tudor High Street, Morton returns to his car and the road where, with an audible sigh of relief, he finds: “Within five minutes of notorious Wigan we were in the depth of the country,” and that “on either side were fields in which men were making hay” (Morton 189).In little more than three pages he passes from one set of haymakers, south of town, to another on its north. The green world has all but smoothed over the industrial eyesore, and the reader, carefully chaperoned by Morton, can pass on to the Lake District having barely glimpsed the realities of industry and urbanism, reassured that if this is the worst that the north has to show then the rural heartland and the essential identity it sustains are safe. Paradoxically, instead of invalidating his account, Morton’s self-evident exclusions and omissions seem only to have fuelled its popularity.For readers of the Daily Express in the months leading up to and immediately after the General Strike of 1926, the myth of England that Morton proffered, of an unspoilt village where old values and traditional hierarchies still held true, was preferable to the violently polarised urban battlefields that the strike had revealed. As the century progressed and the nation suffered depression, war, and a steady decline in its international standing, as industry, suburban sprawl and the irresistible spread of motorways and traffic blighted the land, Morton’s England offered an imagined refuge, a real England that somehow, magically resisted the march of time.Yet if it was Morton’s triumph to provide England with a vision of its ideal spiritual home, it was his tragedy that this portrait of it hastened the devastation of the cultural survivals he celebrated and sought to preserve: “Even as the sense of idyll and peace was maintained, the forces pulling in another direction had to be acknowledged” (Taylor 74).In his introduction to the 1930 edition of In Search of England Morton approvingly acknowledged that a new enthusiasm for the nation’s history and heritage was abroad and that “never before have so many people been searching for England.” In the next sentence he goes on to laud the “remarkable system of motor-coach services which now penetrates every part of the country [and] has thrown open to ordinary people regions which even after the coming of the railways were remote and inaccessible” (Morton vii).Astonishingly, as the waiting charabancs roared their engines and the village greens of England enjoyed the last hours of their tranquillity, Morton somehow failed to make the obvious connection between these unique cultural and social phenomena or take any measure of their potential consequences. His “motoring pastoral” did more than alert the barbarians to the existence of the nation’s hidden treasures, as David Matless notes it provided them with a route map, itinerary and behavioural guide for their pillages (Matless 64; Peach; Batsford).Yet while cultural preservationists wrung their hands in horror at the advent of the day-tripper slouching towards Barnstaple, for Morton this was never a cause for concern. The nature of his journey and the form of its representation demonstrate that the England he worshipped was more an imaginary than a physical space, an ideal whose precise location no chart could fix and no touring party defile. ReferencesAustin, Alfred. Haunts of Ancient Peace. London: Macmillan, 1902.Bartholomew, Michael. In Search of H.V. Morton. London: Methuen, 2004.Batsford, Harry. How to See the Country. London: B.T. Batsford, 1940.Blunden, Edmund. The Face of England: In a Series of Occasional Sketches. London: Longmans, 1932.———. English Villages. London: Collins, 1942.Brannigan, John. “‘England Am I …’ Eugenics, Devolution and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” The Palgrave Macmillan Literature of an Independent England: Revisions of England, Englishness and English Literature. Eds. Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.Cannadine, David. In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. London: Penguin, 2002.Cavaliero, Glen. The Rural Tradition in the English Novel 1900-1939. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Ford, Ford Madox. The Heart of the Country: A Survey of a Modern Land. London: Alston Rivers, 1906.Gervais, David. Literary Englands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Giles, J., and T. Middleton, eds. Writing Englishness. London: Routledge, 1995.Haddow, Elizabeth. “The Novel of English Country Life, 1900-1930.” Dissertation. London: University of London, 1957.Hamilton, Robert. W.H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New York: Kennikat Press, 1946.Keith, W.J. Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965.Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude. The English Middle Classes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.Morris, Margaret. The General Strike. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Morton, H.V. In Search of England. London: Methuen, 1927.Peach, H. Let Us Tidy Up. Leicester: The Dryad Press, 1930.Perry, C.R. “In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy.” Twentieth Century British History 10.4 (1999): 431-56.Roberts, Cecil. Pilgrim Cottage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933.———. Gone Rustic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1934.Taylor, A.J.P. England 1914-1945. The Oxford History of England XV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Taylor, John. War Photography: Realism in the British Press. London: Routledge, 1991.Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.Williamson, Henry. The Village Book. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.Wright, Patrick. A Journey through Ruins: A Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture. London: Flamingo, 1992.

Mechanization signaled the end of the cavalry but the renaissance of heavy cavalry doctrine. The tank heralded the return of breakthrough operations and maneuver warfare. Initially, the western cavalries refused doctrinal revision and chose instead to fight bitter rear guard actions against Fullerist zealots.
The Canadian Cavalry, prompted by Blitzkrieg's triumphs, effortlessly evolved into a tank force---virtually overnight. Canadian doctrine, however, was ersatz. Denied its own vast training areas, the RCAC was sandwiched into southern England and saddled with British warfighting techniques developed in the Western Desert. In Normandy, Canadian operational art was driven by Generals Simonds and Crerar, both gunners, who had neither the skill nor experience to conduct armoured warfare. Hampered by General Montgomery's inability to reproduce a strategic offensive comparable to that demonstrated on the Russian front, Allied armoured forces were squandered in mismanaged frontal attacks.
In the United States, the attempts to protect the horse forced a praetorian's revolt that ended with General Chaffee garroting the US Cavalry, eliminating it from future battlefields. The doctrinal dominance of the American Armored Force was subsequently threatened by a cabal under artillery General Leslie McNair who imposed the Tank Destroyer philosophy. Internecine squabbles and economic nationalism prevented America from producing a tank capable of meeting German panzers on even terms. Though failing technically, the US Armored force succeeded doctrinally via the Louisiana maneuvers and produced a balanced Armored Division. General Bradley's 12th Army Group arrived in France with a purposeful dogma that had been further refined at the Combat Command, Divisional, and Corps level in North Africa and Sicily.
American armour maneuvered during Operation Cobra but it did not fight massed panzers; this was soon redressed in Lorraine where American armoured doctrine reached tactical maturity. Canadian armour fought tank battles throughout Operations Spring, Totalize and Tractable, but it did not maneuver. American and Canadian armour's best opportunity for strategic victory occurred in Normandy. The Canadians, despite better tanks and favourable terrain, failed operationally and received no second chance.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005.
Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 680 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2006 April 22.

In spite of the crucial importance of the Russian front in the outcome of the Second World War, this aspect of the conflict has been studied relatively little in the West since 1945. This omission can be attributed to several factors including linguistic complexity, the difficulty of access to Soviet archives, and the political constraints caused by the ideological climate of the Cold War. Since the time of glasnost' and the collapse of the Soviet block, however, a new era has begun for historians thanks to the release of many documents which had been secret and to the improved ideological climate.
The present work aims to summarise the current situation of the debate in this rapidly expanding field of historiography. Some of the most controversial military, political, and strategic questions are examined, most frequently from a Soviet perspective. These include the Soviet preparations for war and their shortcomings; the German campaign of 1941 and the reasons for its failure; the turning of the tide in 1942-1943, especially the battles of Kursk and Stalingrad; the Yalta conference and the "division of the world"; the role of Stalin and his regime in the "Great Patriotic War"; the human and material losses of the Soviet Union during the conflict; and finally the importance of the Soviet contribution to the victory of the Allies.

An essential and critical component of the orders German front-line formations received in the ideological war against the Soviet Union was the Commissar Order of 6 June 1941. This order, issued by the High Command of the Armed Forces prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, required that front-line military formations, as well as SS and police units attached to the Army, immediately execute Soviet political commissars among prisoners of war. Soviet political commissars were attached to the Red Army at virtually every operational level, and were viewed by both Hitler and the High Command as the foremost leaders of the resistance against the Nazis because of their commitment to Bolshevik ideology. According to the Commissar Order, "Commissars will not be treated as soldiers. The protection afforded by international law to prisoners of war will not apply in their case. After they have been segregated they will be liquidated."
While there is no paucity of information on the existence and intent of the Commissar Order, this directive has only been investigated by scholars as a portion of a much greater ideological portrait, or subsumed in the larger context of overall Nazi criminal activities during "Operation Barbarossa."
Examining the extent to which front-line divisions carried out the charge to shoot all grades of political commissars is necessary if we are to understand the role and depth of involvement by front-line troops of the Wehrmacht in a murderous program of extermination during the German attack and occupation of the Soviet Union. Such an examination has simply not taken place to-date. My dissertation seeks to address this issue. The result is both a narrative on the genesis of the Commissar Order and its attendant decrees and agreements between the Army leadership and the SS ( SD) and Security Police, and a quantitative analysis of how many commissars were reported captured and shot by the front-line forces of the 17th Army over a seven month period.

The subject of this doctoral dissertation is a thematic study of the representation of the Resistance in French fiction films since 1944. This work encompasses the larger fields of history and memory of the Resistance and the Second World War. It is a cinematographic historiography which explores 50 years of film production about the French Resistance. It analyzes the historical choices put forward by film, the censorship which had to be overcome, as well as the sources it used. It also examines how film contributes to the formation of historical consciousness. These developments are compared with the written history of the Resistance. The sources for this work include both visual and written materials: films, preliminary documents, censorship files, and film criticism. Nine interviews provide an additional aspect to this corpus. The parallel drawn between the historiography of the Resistance and the films allowed for a better understanding of the fluctuating relationship between film and historical studies. Also, the examination of this filmography from the perspective of women resisters permitted filmic analysis to move beyond the traditional and politically oriented evaluations of films based on Gaullist or communist memory.

From the deployment of Roger's Rangers in the Seven Years War to the Sunni Awakening in the Second Gulf War, indigenous force cooperation has been a hallmark of significant armed conflicts in modern history. Indigenous forces are, by definition, recruited locally and are paramilitary in nature, as, for the most part, are their activities. They are not regular police, gendarme, or military forces. Rather, they represent a subset of a broader category of force that includes paramilitaries, unconventional forces, guerrillas, some militias, and auxiliaries. The focus of this dissertation is indigenous force cooperation. Indigenous force cooperation occurs when a metropolitan power (be it imperial or expeditionary) collaborates with one or more indigenous forces. Despite recurring employment, indigenous force cooperation remains largely ignored in historical literature and there has been no comprehensive study of the nature, structure, function, or experience of these forces. Using comparative case studies of indigenous force cooperation in Palestine Mandate and Ethiopia during the Second World War, this project seeks to identify whether successful indigenous force cooperation in war exists as a unified historical phenomenon and whether it was instrumental to theatres of operation in which it took place. The research supporting this dissertation includes personally conducted interviews with veterans of the indigenous forces and examinations of recently declassified documents. The comparative framework allows the project to determine what, if any, underlying patterns connect cases of indigenous force employment and govern the success or failure of cooperation. This dissertation consists of a comparative examination of four questions: why cooperation occurred, how cooperation was structured, what happened during cooperation, and whether cooperation was effective. Each chapter of this dissertation addresses one of the questions. Answering these questions will support a number of areas of study, including imperial history and contemporary strategic studies, by providing a theoretical framework by which to understand other cases of indigenous force cooperation.

The collapse of the German Army in the East in the Summer of 1944 is analyzed and determined to be the result of the following specific factors: German intelligence failures; German defensive doctrine; loss of German air superiority; Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union; German mobile reserves committed in the West; Soviet numerical superiority; and Soviet offensive doctrine and tactics. The collapse of Army Group Center, the destruction of the XIII Army Corps, and the collapse of Army Group South Ukraine in Romania during the Summer of 1944 are examined in detail. The significance of the collapse of the German Army in the East is compared to events occurring on the Anglo-American fronts and the German losses on both theaters of military operations are compared. The Soviet contributions to the defeat of the German Army during the Summer of 1944 are examined and the views of Soviet historiography and American historiography compared.

The collapse of the German Army in the East in the Summer of 1944 is analyzed and determined to be the result of the following specific factors: German intelligence failures; German defensive doctrine; loss of German air superiority; Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union; German mobile reserves committed in the West; Soviet numerical superiority; and Soviet offensive doctrine and tactics. The collapse of Army Group Center, the destruction of the XIII Army Corps, and the collapse of Army Group South Ukraine in Romania during the Summer of 1944 are examined in detail. The significance of the collapse of the German Army in the East is compared to events occurring on the Anglo-American fronts and the German losses on both theaters of military operations are compared. The Soviet contributions to the defeat of the German Army during the Summer of 1944 are examined and the views of Soviet historiography and American historiography compared.

Abstract The Battle of the Atlantic is a misnomer for the six-year long struggle over the movement of merchant shipping in the Atlantic Ocean. It was not a discrete battle in the conventional sense, but a series of campaigns initiated by the Germans to either defeat the Western Allies outright or impede the development of their military power and strategy. Only in the winter of 1940–1941, when Great Britain was essentially alone and isolated, could German efforts at sea have won the war through a blockade of Britain. However, they lacked the resources to do so. Thereafter, Germany focused on checking the growth of Allied military power, especially the potential for a Second Front, and relied increasingly on U-boats (submarines). Losses to Allied merchant shipping remained high until 1943, when increased numbers of Allied escorts and aircraft employing improved equipment, tactics, and naval intelligence combined to effectively check Germany’s submarine campaign.

This chapter examines two prominent oil campaigns: Japan's invasion of the Dutch East Indies and northern Borneo from 1941 to 1942 and Germany's aggression against the Soviet Union in World War II from 1941 to 1942. It explains how oil ambitions drove both Japanese and German attacks as they were desperate to acquire additional petroleum resources. It also points out that Japan and Germany's willingness to fight for oil was endogenous to their ongoing conflicts, namely the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945 and World War II in Europe from 1939 to 1945. The chapter analyzes how the Second Sino-Japanese and World War II in Europe were not themselves caused by petroleum ambitions. It also discusses how Japan and Germany delayed their oil campaigns for as long as possible, only resorting to international aggression after alternative means of satisfying national petroleum needs had failed.

Abstract This chapter traces the history of the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan from its origins after World War I to its defeat in 1945. The rise of Hitler and Nazism played an indispensable role in the formation of the Axis. Nazi ideology nurtured affinity with Italian Fascists and Japanese militarists, while Nazi diplomacy departed from traditional German foreign policy. In 1936, Germany reached separate arrangements with Italy and Japan. Germany and Italy concluded the Pact of Steel in 1939. The next year, Japan joined the military alliance to create the Tripartite Pact. German battlefield successes drew Italy, Japan, and other countries closer to Germany. The Axis acquired common enemies in late 1941, but its member states focused on their own distinct campaigns rather than helping each other. What had made the Axis possible in peacetime, its members’ discrete territorial ambitions, turned out to be its greatest weakness in war.

This chapter mentions that refugees from the communist underground were invoking Harry White's name in secret meetings with the FBI and other government agencies, starting a campaign that ultimately would severely damage his posthumous reputation. Jay Vivian Chambers was a one-time member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) who renounced his former activities and became a fervent crusader against communism. The chapter talks about how Chamber would eventually become an iconic hero to anti-communist fanatics because of the sensationalism of the charges he raised against Alger Hiss, Harry White, and many others. It explores that the line between truth and fiction in the stories Chambers spun is never clear, and much of what he claimed, is impossible to verify. Chambers testified multiple times under oath that he left the Communist Party at the end of 1937.

Abstract This chapter focuses on Theresienstadt, the concentration camp near Prague that held a unique place in the Nazis’ campaign of extermination. It discusses how the concentration camp was presented to the outside world as a self-governing Jewish settlement, which was a way to support the fiction that the removal of Jews from German society was being carried out in a humane fashion. The concentration camp survivor H. G. Adler considers the purpose of Theresienstadt as the most gruesome ghost dance in the history of Adolf Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. The chapter highlights how Adler gathered his materials since he entered Theresienstadt to his eventual release from Auschwitz, and compiled them into his work entitled Theresienstadt 1941–1945. Adler’s book is divided into History, Sociology, and Psychology and contains primary sources as well as his own words.