'The Klopper Affair': Anglo-South African Relations and the Surrender of the Tobruk Garrison

The loss of the Tobruk garrison in June 1942 proved to be oneof the worst military disasters suffered by the British Empireduring the Second World War. Following the surrender of Singaporeearlier that same year it represented something of a nadir inpublic confidence about how the war was being conducted. Atthe same time it also threatened the relationship between Britainand one of its Dominion wartime partners, the Union of SouthAfrica. The considerable military force based at Tobruk hadbeen commanded by a young and relatively inexperienced SouthAfrican general and included an entire South African division.The decision to surrender these forces—over 30,000 men—aftera siege lasting less than 48 hours led to allegations of cowardiceand treachery. Winston Churchill meanwhile faced a parliamentaryvote of confidence in his leadership. He ultimately had fewproblems restoring his position and proved adept at resistingcalls for a public enquiry. With the subsequent victory at thefinal battle at E1 Alamein the affair quickly receded from thepublic attention. During the summer of 1942 the possibilityhad however existed of a serious and damaging rift developingwithin the Imperial alliance.     

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War: European perspectives

In this Special Issue, the authors explore the various ways in which the Second World War shaped children's experiences in the post-war period. They map the multifaceted interest or non-interest of states all over Europe for children in the years after the war, filter out groups of children who recall that the consequences of the Second World War significantly influenced their childhood, and investigate the childhood policies directed towards them, as well as their childhood experiences and the memories they foster about their childhood. In addition, they have included case studies from Western, Central and Eastern Europe with the aim of sparking a debate as to whether it was only a similar lifecycle that war children in early post-war Europe shared, or if they also had some life experiences in common.     

Childhood in the shadow of war: filled with work and play

This study was focused on war-time childhood. The target period covers the war years 1939–1945 and the years of post-war reconstruction. The research was based on memories of 13 participants who lived in the countryside in northern Finland during the Second World War. The purpose of the study was to find out what children's everyday life was like during the war. According to the results, children did play regardless of the war situation. Children also participated in household work actively. By highlighting children's experiences and perspectives, this study provided important information about children's survival during war time. The study also helps understanding the effects of wars from children's point of view.     

The Boer War and the Media (1899-1902)

The South African War that broke out in October 1899 was bothvery old and very new. It was a traditional war, the last ofthe old-fashioned British imperial wars, with cavalry playinga significant part. But it was also a very modern war, for instancein the British Army's use of railways to subdue the Boers inthe early months of 1900, or the use of trench warfare by theBoers along the Modder river. It was disturbingly new in theway that it changed in the autumn of 1900 from a war betweenarmies to a guerrilla war against a civilian population, mostdistastefully so in the British concentration camps set up tohouse Boer women and children. Above all, it was a distinctlycontemporary war in its impact on the media, especially thenewspapers, and in the interaction between the media and thoseparticipating in the fighting. It was a significant war, farbigger than originally expected, and was therefore big news.The British Army, ill-prepared for the original Boer invasionof Natal, at first numbered 75,000 troops. In the end, the Britishand imperial forces totalled 450,000 with contingents from Canada,Australia, New Zealand, and India. The British lost 22,000 men,13,000 of them from disease. The Boers lost about 7,000 in thefield, while another 27,000 (many of them very young children)are estimated to have died in the concentration camps. Therewere also about 20,000 black and ‘coloured’ Africanswho died in concentration camps, though this was little reportedat the time. So it was a major episode in British military history.The impact on British opinion of the relief of Ladysmith andespecially of Mafeking in 1900 was quite overwhelming. In afrenzy of ‘jingo’ celebration, the verb ‘mafficking’entered the language. In these circumstances, the consequencesof the Boer War on the media and its representation of war wereinevitably massive.     

French public attitudes towards the prospect of war in 1938 1939: 'pacifism' or 'war anxiety'?

This article challenges the received wisdom that French publicopinion was infused with pacifist sentiment during the 1930sand that this sentiment in turn contributed to the French defeatof 1940. It will suggest that French public attitudes towardsthe prospect of war can be better defined as ‘war anxiety’rather than the value-laden term ‘pacifism’. Takingas a test case the period between the Munich Agreement of September1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War less than a yearlater, the article will tease out the necessary distinctionbetween ‘pacifism’ and war anxiety. By employinga notion of ‘representations’ of public opinion,it will be shown how French opinion was demonstrably less pacifistthan many existing analyses assume. Instead, it will be contendedthat the public's anxieties with regard to a future war manifestedthemselves in a variety of ways, of which pacifism was merelyone example. Indeed, war anxiety increasingly demanded thatFrance prepare for an inevitable conflict, in stark contrastto simply retreating into a defeatist mindset. War anxiety wasfar from being a contributing factor in the defeat of 1940.     

Imagining Icarus: Edward Field,Manhood and Authenticity in Post-war America1

While the Second World War had profound effects on the way that American men conceived of themselves, for two groups - Jewish men and men who would later identify as gay - the war held a special resonance. Deborah Dash Moore has demonstrated that the Second World War allowed Jewish men to cast off stereotypes and be accepted into the larger American polity, while Alan Berube has written about the ways in which the Second World War created a space where gay men were able to understand themselves as part of a larger community. Historians have looked at the ways service affected these men during the war, however more work needs to be done understanding how these experiences affected men after the war. By examining the life of Edward Field, a Jewish and gay veteran who became a prominent poet in post-war America, we can understand how experiences of wartime allowed men like Field to construct an alternative idea of masculinity, one based on male camaraderie and emotional authenticity. Edward Field's wartime and post-war experiences suggest that Jewish and gay identities could intersect in ways that were mutually reinforcing and highlight the complicated nature of the Second World War experience.     

Women and Work after the Second World War: A Case Study of the Jute Industry, Circa 1945-1954

This article examines the attempts by the Dundee jute industryto recruit women workers in the years circa 1945–1954.It locates its discussion of these attempts in the literatureon the impact of the Second World War on the participation ofwomen in the British labour market more generally, and the forcesdetermining that participation. It stresses the peculiaritiesof jute as a traditional major employer of women operating invery specific market conditions, but suggests that this casestudy throws light on the broader argument about the impactof war and early post-war conditions on women's participationin paid work.     

60余年来中国学者关于第二次世界大战性质问题的研究

中国学者对第二次世界大战性质和阶段划分问题的研究历来十分重视.早在20世纪40年代就有学者对第二次世界大战的性质进行论述;50年代中后期曾进行过一次激烈的争鸣;80年代以来,关于二次大战性质问题的观点更加多样化.与此同时,学者们也对与第二次世界大战相关的阶段划分问题进行了深入的探讨,并提出了确定二次大战性质的标准和依据.     

Imported memories: the Italian audience and the reception of American movies about the Second World War

Memories of the Second World War played a central role in shaping the European imaginary and in founding the European political order after 1945. Nevertheless, while the Second World War was a global event, its memories have been mainly studied from a national point of view, thus underestimating the conspicuous phenomena of transmission of narratives and representations of the conflict from one country to another. This article analyzes the Italian reception of American movies about the Second World War, as a way to overcome the preponderance of a nation-centered perspective and to open up to a transnational analysis mainly based on the concepts of communication, diffusion and exportation of cultural products. After a theoretical introduction, the article analyzes an original source of great use for the study of the reception of American movies: the evaluation forms produced by the audience of an Italian cineforum about five American war movies in the 1960s. The importance of the source lies in its rarity: direct testimonies of the opinion of a non-specialist public about a movie are very rare, and thus extremely precious for a bottom-up approach to such issues.     

Radar and Air Defence in the 1930s

The article sets out to demonstrate that radar played a central,but hitherto unrecognized, role in the formation of Britishair policy during the 1930s. It is generally conceived thatthe secret of radar was stumbled across, as if by accident,in early 1935, and was then employed to devastating effect inthe Battle of Britain. The article, however, shows that thedesire for an effective instrument for air defence had gestatedduring the First World Wart—when Britain sought to fightoff the Zeppelin and Gotha bombing raids—and the searchcontinued throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Moreover, theprinciple of radar had been known since 1904, but scientificbackwardness precluded practical progress. There is detailedexamination of the intricate political manoeuvring by PrimeMinister Stanley Baldwin and others which accompanied the adoptionof radar as Britain's primary line of defence against the Luftwaffein preference to the increasingly obsolete doctrine of bomberdeterrence. In conclusion, radar was deliberately developed,and consciously conceived of, as a device that would be slottedinto a proved framework of observation and organization constructedon top of Britain's First World War air defence system.     

War in the mental hospitals: sychiatry and clinical files (1940 – 52)

Abstract

Is there a connection between war and madness? How have psychiatrists responded to the problem of those ‘driven mad by war’? This article tries to answer these questions by drawing on clinical records for three Italian psychiatric hospitals in the period from 1940 to 1950. While these problems have been researched and debated for combatants during the World War I, in the case of the World War II, as this article shows, it is necessary to take into account the impact of war not only on soldiers but also on civilians who were equally involved in the trauma of war.     

'More carrot than stick', British Economic Warfare and Spain, 1941-1944

During the Second World War, economic factors became a centralaspect of Spain's relations to both Britain and Nazi Germany.In 1940, when the Franco regime was on the brink of joiningthe war on the side of the Axis, Britain tried to use Spain’sdependence on imports from the west to convince Franco to retainhis country's neutrality. Although, at the time, British ‘economicappeasement’ was not a major factor in the failure ofGerman-Spanish negotiations, it contributed to Spain's verygradual detachment from Nazi Germany over subsequent years.Between1941 and 1944, the focus of British policy towards Spain movedfrom keeping the country out of the war to restricting the servicesSpain rendered to the German war economy. Franco's sympathiesfor the Nazi regime and the economic and financial benefitsof continuing trade with Germany made British and US economicwarfare activities however only a partial success.     

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WHITEHORSE: 1898–1945

In the spring of 1975 Canada supplied one chapter in the Vietnam “Babylift.” Canadians disagreed about the Babylift's meaning for themselves and their nation. For some, it offered the opportunity to rescue child casualties of war and to confirm a multicultural country; for others, it constituted kidnapping and evidence of Western imperialism. This dual response is explored in four parts in this article. First, there is a brief history of Canadian adoption, which grew gradually more inclusive after World War II to include youngsters of Asian origin. Second, it describes public, especially newspaper, responses to the US war in Vietnam and the place of children in this. Third, it introduces adults engaged in the Babylift and their approach to international adoption more generally. And finally, it profiles the children involved and examines what rescue or kidnapping might have entailed for them.     

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.     

Whose Opinion?: Changing Attitudes Towards Opinion Polling in British politics, 1937-1964

This article examines the early history of opinion polling inBritish politics, focusing on the initial antagonism to pollingmethods within the political and media elite in the 1930s, andthe gradual integration of polling into the political systemafter World War II. It rejects the technological determinismof scholars who assume that the adoption of opinion pollingfollowed naturally on the creation of such methodology; andinstead focuses on the time-lag between the advent of pollingand its integration into political life. While not an explicitlycomparative study, a major question which this study considersis why were British politicians and publishers so much slowerto embrace opinion research than their American counterparts?In answering this question, this article examines various structuralfeatures of the British political system, cultural assumptionsabout parliamentary politics, and specific historical aspectsof the advent of opinion polling in Britain which affected thereception of the new methodology. While this article concludesthat structural factors—namely the return of a competitivetwo-party system after the Second World War—ultimatelyled the political parties to experiment with opinion polling,this article argues that continued ambivalence about the useof poll data can only be understood through a considerationof the cultural and historical circumstances surrounding theintroduction of polling.     

For Mothers,Peace and Family: International (Non)‐Cooperation among Italian Catholic and Communist Women's Organisations during the Early Cold War

In July 1955, women from around the globe gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland for the World Congress of Mothers organised by the social‐communist Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). On the third day of four days of proceedings, an Italian housewife named Clotilde Cassigoli delivered an impassioned speech calling on women to unite across the divides of the Cold War, and cooperate to ensure that their children and grandchildren would not have to know the horrors of war she had witnessed in Florence at the end of the Second World War. Her plea ultimately went unheeded. This article analyses the national and international activities of Catholic and communist women's organisations between 1945 and 1956 to expand understandings of women's political involvement during the Cold War. My examination of the Italian case will show that during this era cooperation between the politically opposed women's groups was only possible in a limited framework. By interpreting the associations’ discourse of motherhood and peace through a Cold War lens, I show that the Italian women's leaders were successful at advancing their own objectives and making inroads into the homes of more Italian women while they simultaneously constructed a divisive Cold War international women's movement.     

From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women's Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania

This article explores how women fighters tell their stories in relation to the dominant state narratives about a partisan war. In addition to engaging their individual stories, it explores how they speak, write and act as memory entrepreneurs, creating collective memory about a past that they have experienced instead of allowing others to select actors and events for historical narratives. It argues that memory regimes and gender cultures are intertwined, and that gender cultures are essential in understanding the cultural choices made by memory entrepreneurs in memory making. The article analyses the oral testimonies and written memoirs of two women, Rakhel’ Margolis and Aldona Vilutien? (neé Sabaityt?), who were partisans in Lithuania during the Second World War (Margolis) and its aftermath (Vilutien?) and created the first museums dealing with the Second World War and its legacy in post‐Soviet Lithuania. Read as stories about what it was like to be a woman during a partisan war, the narratives include some common themes: widespread betrayal, the difficult physical conditions that they had to endure as women and the vulnerability that came with these experiences. Read as stories told by memory entrepreneurs, the narratives reveal that the two women acted as mnemonic warriors fighting for competing memory regimes built on opposing gender ideologies.     

国际法、女权保护与第一次世界大战期间的英德宣传战

宣称战争因某种道德理想而展开是一次大战的显特征,国际法、平民权益特别是妇女儿童权益保护就成了区分和衡量战争正义合法与否的标尺。英德关于非人道作战方式的合法性争执凸显出国际法存在的严重缺失及其在宣传战中作用的有限性,而侵害最易成为战争受难的妇女儿童权利便成了宣传战中最能调动舆论情绪、最易产生宣传效果的主题,这也是英国适时将宣传战主题从德国违反国际法切换到德军大规模强暴妇女儿童上来的主要原因。     

Mimi Pinson Goes to War: Taste,Class and Gender in France, 1900–18

In the years leading up to the First World War, the Frenchwomen of a free performing‐arts programme for female workers, known as the Mimi Pinsons, began to appear frequently in popular stories, articles, poems and songs as cultural shorthand for a renovated social vision of France. Founded by composer and philanthropist Gustave Charpentier in 1900, the Oeuvre de Mimi Pinson taught its worker–students elementary music, song and dance, and gradually expanded to include a charitable organisation and social network. A closer examination of the OMP reveals that its members were also used to reconcile early twentieth‐century French anxieties about working‐class militancy and even war by way of a potent cultural association of female sexuality, aesthetic refinement and labour. In the years before the First World War, the Mimi Pinsons were defined by journalists, government officials and the OMP's own organisers according to a formulaic type which at once modernised and constrained the role of the female Parisian worker. Associated almost exclusively with the luxury‐garment trades – seamstresses, flowermakers, milliners and department‐store clerks – the new Mimi Pinsons were embraced by the public as naturally chic yet diligent guardians of French art and craft. These female worker–students allowed an easy merging of the body of the female worker with particularly French notions of the patriotic responsibility of feminine taste. When the First World War came, many of the Mimi Pinsons joined the war effort as workers and nurses, yet they were embraced by the public primarily for their service as tasteful creators of patriotic decorative objects, and as an ideal symbolic figure for managing anxieties about the social dissolution that came with the war.