Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea*

On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, consideration of three other instances of encounter between Orokaiva people in PNG’s Oro Province and Australian colonial forces disrupt the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel trope on which this recognition ritual hinges. These encounters include the wartime executions of Orokaiva men by Australian forces, recent protests by landowners along the Kokoda Track and the murder of two European gold miners at the beginning of the twentieth century by Orokaiva warriors. Considered together, narratives about these encounters speak to an asymmetrical field of power in which Australia acts to control the terms and temporalities of the recognition it offers to wartime carriers and their descendants, enacting particular, contingent forms of relationality in ways that reproduce colonial hierarchies.     

Clarendon,Cavour, and the Intervention of Sardinia in the Crimean War, 1853–1855

The notorious arms trader Sir Basil Zaharoff is remembered as the archetypal ‘merchant of death’. During the First World War, he is alleged to have exercised a malign influence over statesmen in London and Paris. Recently released Foreign Office files now allow us to document Zaharoff's wartime activities on behalf of the British government as an agent of influence in the Levant. The new sources reveal that Sir Vincent H.P. Caillard, the financial director of the arms-maker Vickers, played a key role in making Zaharoff's services available to prime ministers Asquith and Lloyd George. While Zaharoff has often been portrayed as a sinister force, manipulating statesmen into pursuing his financial and political interests, the reality was the reverse. Zaharoff was a convenient tool of two prime ministers rather than a powerful political manipulator in his own right.     

The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners During the First World War

During the First World War, the German and British Governments supplied culturally appropriate rations and secured special facilities for food preparation and consumption for South Asian prisoners of war whose loyalty both governments sought. The food provided in POW camps to South Asians serves as an index of the political status of colonial subjects at a moment when the future of European empires was far from certain. The British Government’s approach to feeding its South Asian servicemen held by the enemy thus reveals this population’s place within Britain’s wartime national and imperial imaginary and in its post-war planning.     

American Red Cross posters and the cultural politics of motherhood in World War I

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.     

‘Stepping into history’: reading the Second World War through Irish women's diaries

This article examines two very different wartime diary accounts by Irish women, Romie Lambkin, a driver in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and Mary Morris, who nursed in England, France and Belgium. Both texts assert the legitimacy of the Irishwoman's wartime story through consciously placing themselves in history, affirmed by the difference between their ‘real’ existence as participants in the war, and the ‘unreal’ Eire, outside history and reality, a ‘fairyland’, as Lambkin calls it, of lights and food set against a blacked out and bombed out Europe. More broadly, drawing on theoretical perspectives on life-writing and identity, the discussion focuses on these accounts as dynamic, vividly written contributions to our understanding of the war experience, showing how the subjective experience narrated in a diary has an important place in the collective historical narrative of the Second World War.     

The First World War and European Integration

The importance of the First World War in European integration history has been understated. Before 1914, intensifying economic integration had not brought corresponding political integration. But once hostilities broke out, Germany pursued indirect economic and military domination over its neighbours and a Central European economic association based on agreements with Austria-Hungary. The drive for the latter had little success, because of Germany's own uncertainties as well as Austria-Hungary's resistance. From 1916 the French government also pursued the goal of border buffer states, together with a permanent inter-Allied economic bloc, but was likewise unsuccessful. Nonetheless, the wartime experience helped to shape later integration initiatives during the inter-war years and even beyond.     

Remaking the Fighting Man. Martial Masculinity and the British Army’s Command Depots, 1915–1918

During the First World War, the British Army sought to avoid manpower wastage by setting up ‘Command Depots’ specialising in physical therapy for the wounded. The present article will argue that Command Depots restored military usefulness in tandem with the restoration of an appropriately martial masculine identity. Additionally, in contrast to recent studies that focus on non-compliance with authority, the article will also contend that in the case of Command Depots there is evidence to demonstrate a general approval of the system’s processes, with trainees being embraced as exemplars of masculine conduct in wartime.     

Global War and its impact on the Gulf States of Kuwait and Bahrain, 1914–1918

This article provides the first detailed analysis of the Gulf States of Kuwait and Bahrain during the First World War. It argues that the war had a disruptive effect on these states’ politics, societies, economies and trans-regional networks. As well as writing the wartime experiences of Kuwait and Bahrain into the conflict’s global history, it aids our understanding of the effects of world-wide conflict on states which are not major belligerent powers.     

The Russian Orthodox Church and ‘Patriotic’ Support for the Stalinist Regime during the Great Patriotic War

Soviet wartime propaganda and contemporary Russian work on the activities of the Orthodox Church during the war promote the Church’s claim that it was motivated by patriotism, a point it used to claim legitimacy in the USSR and now in contemporary Russia. In contrast, this paper argues that the hierarchs and laity of the Patriarchal Church were not essentially motivated by patriotism or the desire to show loyalty to the Soviet regime in 1941, but instead acted to use the war to achieve three goals: first and most important, to become relevant in the everyday life of the Soviet people by promoting Christian beliefs and values; second, to earn legitimacy in the eyes of anti-clerics and non-believers by lending moral and practical support to the war effort; and finally, to obtain legal standing by showing its trustworthiness and loyalty through displays of Russian (not Soviet) patriotism consonant with its historic role, all the while without endorsing communist ideology. The hierarchs orchestrated a campaign from the top down throughout the clerical hierarchy, to achieve the aforementioned goals whilst from below the faithful, independently of the hierarchs, used their local displays of patriotism as leverage to reopen local churches and to force the regime to respect their right to worship. The grassroots response by believers and parish clerics in support of the Church and its wartime activities represents primarily an endorsement of the Church, Christianity, Russian patriotism, and only secondarily, if at all, loyalty to the Stalinist regime.     

Between Social Reformism and Conservatism: Soviet women under the Finnish occupation regime, 1941–1944

The article deals with the Finnish gender policies during the occupation of Soviet Karelia in 1941–1944. It explores the wartime occupation of Soviet Karelia as a clash of Bolshevik and Finnish visions of the woman's position in society, including the level of visual propaganda. Based on oral history interviews and former Soviet archival materials, it also demonstrates how the local population reacted to social visions imposed from above, thus combining the approaches from ‘above’ and from ‘below’.     

‘The Futurist mountains’: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's experiences of mountain combat in the First World War

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti's aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war's relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino.     

The power of the “Stockpile”: American aid and China’s Wartime everyday

ABSTRACT

This article argues that American and British narratives about the existence of a “stockpile” of Chinese goods had a powerful impact on US-China relations, China’s war effort, and China’s wartime everyday. Focusing on both the material and discursive construction of the so-called stockpile in the early 1940s, the work seeks to deconstruct a powerful symbol that was long used by both British and American officials (particularly in the US War Department) to delegitimize the Nationalist government’s war effort against Japan. Drawing on sources collected at archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan, the article seeks to rethink many commonly held assumptions about American aid and to reveal the powerful influence that the symbolic presence of the stockpile had in shaping Sino-American relations in the wartime period and beyond.     

‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’: heritage of Second World War forced movement and destruction in a Sámi reindeer herding community in Finnish Lapland

In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base there in 1941, and the Germans and the villagers lived as close neighbours for several years. In 1944 the villagers were evacuated before the outbreak of the Finno-German ‘Lapland War’ of 1944–1945, in which the German troops annihilated their military installations and the civilian infrastructure. Today the ruins of demolished German military installations persist around the village as vivid reminders, and act for the villagers as important active agents in memorising this vital phase in Lapland’s recent past. They also appear to facilitate nostalgia for the more independent days before traditional Sámi lifeways were ruptured by stronger Finnish State intervention in the post-war decades.     

Renzo De Felice,the resistance and the historian' task

Abstract

The Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture sponsored a two‐day conference in April 1998: ‘Behind enemy lines in World War II, the Resistance and the OSS in Italy’. On this occasion William Corvo of Middletown, Connecticut, donated the wartime papers of his father, Max Corvo. Max Corvo played a principal role in Organization of Strategic Services operations in Sicily and Italy during the war, linking the OSS and the Italian Resistance. Veterans of both the OSS and the Italian Resistance attended the symposium. We present here some of the papers that focused on the principal theme of the meeting: ‘The Resistance, war of liberation or civil war?’. Authors are: Borden Painter, Department of History at Trinity College; Vittorio Gozzer, partisan veteran and liaison for the conference with Italian partisan organizations; James Miller, historian at the State Department; Roy Domenico, Department of History at the University of Scranton; David Ward, Department of Italian at Wellesley College; Steven White, Department of History at Mount St Mary's College (Maryland); Spencer Di Scala, Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Borden Painter and John Alcorn organized the conference for the Barbieri Endowment.     

Technological change and Post Office communications in Britain, 1918–1945

The pressures of both World War I and World War II made the British Post Office a central concern in national politics. Yet this development has received little attention in the historiography of the Post Office or the British state. The demands of war and expectations for service from individuals living in a consumer society raised questions as to how to improve technology and infrastructure to satisfy these divergent needs. The Post Office’s position as a department within the Civil Service meant that debates over the nature of technology, and the levels of spending required to sustain and improve Post Office services inevitably led to heated discussions concerning the practicalities of increased spending during the economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s, and the subsequent pre-war planning period from 1937. This article will explore these issues by examining the nature of the Government-Post Office relationship in this period, and trace how the relationship evolved to accommodate the growing needs of the domestic and wartime economy. It will show the growing centrality of the Post Office to the nation’s communications planning. Moreover, it will demonstrate how a mixture of new technology, and an adaptation of working practices helped it adapt to both the peacetime economy of the 1920s, and the pressures of the World War II.     

Archaeological Assessment of Second World War Anti‐Torpedo Close Protection Pontoons in Scapa Flow,Orkney

This paper presents the outcomes of sidescan sonar and archaeological diving surveys in 2015 of two wrecked vessels located off Flotta Island, Orkney, North Scotland. Archival research indicates these are the remains of Anti‐Torpedo Close Protection Pontoons (ATCPP), an experimental protection device used for close protection of naval vessels at anchor in Scapa Flow from attack by aircraft‐launch torpedoes. The pontoons were only in operation in Scapa Flow for 13 months (March 1941–April 1942) and few were brought into service. As such they represent a rare heritage resource, for which very little is known about their operation.     

Between subversion and coup d'etat: military power and politics after the Great War (1919 – 1922)

Abstract

One of the chief accusations brought against the Italian army has been that between 1919 and 1922 it decided to exert its own political will, venturing to the bounds of subversion in its effort to reorganize the Italian state in a reactionary direction. But the participation of officers and soldiers in episodes of street fighting, in the name of a patriotic anti-Socialist mobilization, or the implication of generals in rumors of golpe, signals of a downhill trend in terms of military discipline, constituted merely the most visible and salient aspect of a much more complex process, rich in nuances, contradictions, and fractures – the process of politicization of the Italian military following the First World War. Really, various sectors of the postwar Italian army and navy clearly preferred to abandon the strong tradition of political neutrality for the prerogative and the privileges offered by the new model of civilian – military relations established by the wartime legislation of 1915. The postwar Italy represented a particular variant on the normalization of the role of the military in Europe, to such a degree that it would be more appropriate to speak of a ‘failure to demobilize wartime culture’ for the military officers themselves, which translated in the concrete terms of political action into the decision not to accept being cloistered once more in their barracks. With the so called Governatorati Militari in Dalmatia, Venezia Giulia and Trentino, the military authorities were licensed to wield practically absolute power, free not only of the normal chain of command but also uncontrolled by the Italian government. The politicization of the officer corps, suspicions concerning the loyalty to the institutions of many of that corps' commanders, the psychosis of the Soviet uprising of the troops, all converged to make the army an unreliable instrument in the eyes of the civilian leadership. A mistrust that would grow in the months to come, sharpening the power crisis of the liberal state and revealing itself fully at the time of that state's collapse, between the summer and the autumn of 1922.     

Recalling the War in China： The Dahoufang Project in Chongqing and the Restoration of a Legacy

This article presents a rare inside view of a unique project currently underway in China to study and preserve the memory of possibly the single most seminal event in Chinese modern history, the War of Resistance against Japan （1937-45）. The article introduces a multi-faceted program to preserve the wartime cultural heritage; the work is ongoing in the thriving western metropolis of Chongqing, once China＇s bomb-torn wartime capital and international Allied command center. It describes how, seven decades after World War II, scholars, cultural workers, government experts, and artists in China are joining hands in an unprecedented, all-encompassing project to record, restore, and recount the extraordinary legacy of China＇s War of Resistance in its local, as well as national and global contexts.     

‘Postponing the Evil Day’: Sir Edward Grey and British Foreign Policy

ABSTRACT

Sir Edward Grey is remembered largely as Britain's Foreign Secretary when ‘the lights went out all over Europe’ in the summer of 1914. His record remains contested. From David Lloyd George's crafty deception in his wartime memoirs to more recent revisionist historians, writers have sought to blame Grey for the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on substantial research in private and official, British, and foreign archives, this paper will reconstruct Grey's career as Foreign Secretary with an emphasis on his objectives and the means which he employed to obtain them. Crucially, it places Grey's stewardship of British foreign policy within the broader international context, defined by the steep decline and subsequent renaissance of Russian power in the years between 1905 and 1912/13, with the aim of establishing the limitations of British power. More especially the shift in the international balance around 1913/14 shaped towards Russia, and away from Germany, shaped Grey's calculations during Europe's last summer. The July Crisis showed both the strengths and the limitations of Grey's diplomacy, this persistent and subtle pressing for mediation, but also his misreading of Austro-Hungarian policy.     

The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.