Command,Leadership, and Doctrine on the Great War Battlefield: The Australian,British, and Canadian Experience at the Battle of Arras,May 1917

Abstract

The experience on the Somme in 1916, and the unprecedented losses suffered in the attempt to break through the German defences, forced the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to re-evaluate its attack doctrine. James Edmonds, the of?cial historian of the British army in the Great War has stated, ‘It is not too much to claim that the foundations of the ?nal victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916’. Gary Shef?eld reaf?rmed this view more recently: ‘The battle of the Somme was not a victory in itself, but without it the entente would not have emerged victorious in 1918’. Historical assessments of the Somme campaign are divided regarding the success and/or failure of the battle, but it is clear that the experience spurred efforts to correct the problems encountered in 1916. Infantry tactics, weapons, training, artillery, machine guns, command and control, communications, and support services were all adapted based on the lessons learned at the Somme. Only seven months after the catastrophic losses suffered on 1 July, the BEF embarked on it next major offensive at Arras. This article will examine the ?ghting on one day of the Arras offensive to analyse the evolution of the British Empire method of attack. On 3 May 1917 Haig ordered an attack by First, Third, and Fifth Armies astride the Scarpe River. At 0345 hours fourteen British, Canadian, and Australian divisions launched an assault against German positions in the Drocourt-Quéant Switch and Hindenburg Line. By the end of the day all British divisions has been repulsed while the Australians maintained a toehold in the German line. Only the Canadians were able to capture and hold their objective. This article will argue that command and the application of doctrine made the difference between success and failure on that day.     

The Great War,the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

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.     

Commemoration of the Great War: A Global Phenomenon or a National Agenda?

During the First World War, people from all over the world were present in Flanders Fields. On the eve of the centenary of the Great War, it is striking that the war is not commemorated as strongly in every country that was involved. This article explores the specific national sensitivities related to the commemoration of the First World War and the reasons why some states commemorate it more strongly than others. The data for this article were obtained through desk research and expert interviews. In addition to focusing on the main conclusions, this article briefly explores some theoretical insights on memory and commemoration. The particular history of a nation’s involvement in the war, the extent to which the war contributed to the nation-building process of the state in question, the extent to which a military tradition existed and the extent to which civil society was involved in the commemorative events are all factors that influence the intensity and the way that the war is commemorated. Another remarkable difference is that the emphasis of commemorative events is on a contemporary peace message in some states while other nations focus on the memory as such. Remembrance of Flanders Fields in particular is only important to some nations. The commemoration of the First World War is, as well as much other expressions of heritage, a historic and social construct.     

The End of the Cold War on the Cold War?

Melvyn P. Leffler. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War .     

What Did You Do in the War, Mutti? Courageous Women, Compassionate Commanders, and Stories of the Second World War

In the mid–1950s, West Germans were ready to fight theSecond World War again, this time at the cinema. This paperanalyses Kinder, Mütter und ein General, a war film inwhich a band of courageous women pushed to the eastern frontin March 1945 to bring home their sons who had only just puton Wehrmacht uniforms. The paper concludes that the film indicateshow West Germans had come to understand the past of the wara decade after the shooting stopped, and how memories of thewar also shaped contemporary discussions of rearmement, therehabilitation of the Wehrmacht, and the redefinition of ‘awomen's place’ after the defeat of Fascism.     

War and the emergence of the English parliament, 1297–1360

Although the opening of the Hundred Years' War led the kings of France and England to make similar demands upon their subjects, the effect on the monarchy and on the Estates was markedly different in the two countries. In England taxation gave parliament a central role in the medieval polity while in France it strengthened first local autonomy and then absolute monarchy. Because parliament had an inescapable obligation to grant taxation for common defence, the Commons sought to limit this to periods of open war, and to criticise and control the handling and expenditure of the tax. The character of taxation, as levied by common assent and for the common profit, likewise permitted resistance to the extension of prerogative rights and the assertion of parliament's right to grant the tax on wool. In these matters the Commons were forced into a defensive dialogue with the Crown over their obligations which educated them in political argument and the techniques of parliamentary opposition. The power to levy taxation on grounds of ‘necessity of state’ strengthened both monarchies; but in England this was subject to the assent and authority of parliament which thereby emerged as a political institution concerned with the common needs of the realm.     

“Nobody’s children?”: the Ministry of Pensions and the treatment of disabled Great War veterans in the Irish Free State, 1921–1939

This article analyses the treatment and rehabilitation of disabled Irish Great War veterans who lived in the Irish Free State. To do so, it utilises the records of the Ministry of Pensions, the British governmental department, that was charged with assisting these men. This research argues that the Irish Free State was a particularly challenging society for disabled ex-servicemen to reside. Yet, whilst the social and governmental reception on offer to disabled Great War veterans was less favourable in the Free State than their similarly afflicted former comrades in Britain, they were better able to benefit from substantial assistance from the Ministry of Pensions. The department lived up to its billing as an “imperial obligation” in the newly formed state.     

Hating America? Great Britain and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

This article examines reactions in Great Britain to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953. Through an assessment of the papers of the British National Rosenberg Defence Committee and other archival sources, it challenges the view that British responses were characterised by anti-Americanism. It suggests that the protest movement was heterogeneous, motivated by various concerns and even had significant intellectual and political links with the US. Moreover, the bipolar international system of the early Cold War and desire not to jeopardise the nascent Anglo-American relationship prevented the growth of a more popular movement. This research adds to work on perceptions of the US in the political culture of post-war Britain.     

War memorials and the commemoration of the Israeli war of independence, 1948–1956

Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1620–1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scripture's Sacred Territory, Lanham, Maryland, University Press of America, 1994.

Steven Beller, Herzl, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991, 161 pp.

Theodor Herzl: Briefe und Tagebucher, Briefe 1895–1898, Vol. 4, 1990, and Briefe 1898–1900, Vol. 5, 1991, Barbara Schäfer et al, eds., Frankfurt/M., Propyläen Verlag.

Jacques Kornberg, Theodar Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, 272 pp., $24.95.

Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, £29.95.

Laura Zittrain-Eisenberg, My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900–1948, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1994, 211 pp., $29.95.

Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al‐Hajj Amin al‐Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, New York, Columbia University Press (Revised Edition), 1991.

Hava Eshkoli (Wagman), Silence: Mapai and the Holocaust — 1939–1942, Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1994.

Yechiam Weitz, Aware but Helpless: Mapai and the Hobcaust — 1943–1945, Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1994.

Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. xii, 498 pp., bibliography, index, illustrations, £32.50.

Dov Gavish, Land and Map: The Survey of Palestine, 1920–1948 (Hebrew), Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1991, 297 pp.

David H. Shpiro, From Philanthropy to Activism: The Political Transformation of American Zionism in the Holocaust Years 1933–1945, New York, Pergamon Press, 1994, xxxvi + 208 pp.

Asher Susser, On Both Banks of the Jordan: A Political Biography of Wasfi al‐Tall, Frank Cass, London, 1994.

Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra‐Orthodox Jewry. New York, Schocken Books, 1992, xxxi, 394 pp., $27.50.

Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity, New York, New York University Press, 1994, xii+279 pp.