Eye in the sky: visual geographies and emotional topographies of First World War airmen

Although the First World War highlighted human vulnerability through the terrors of a mechanised warfare ravaging the male body in new ways, it also fostered moments of intimacy and tenderness that privileged commonality, mutuality, and generosity, and encouraged friendship and comradeship as cornerstones of martial masculinities. This article explores such intimacies through analysis of letters and diaries written by British Royal Flying Corps airmen during combat on the Western Front. Informed by history of emotions approaches, I discuss the ways the sensual geographies of aerial combat and their promise of mastery and expanded vision shaped the emotional topographies of airmen’s combat lives. Following Santanu Das’s scholarship on the claustrophobic haptic geographies of trench warfare, this article addresses the following question: If the claustrophobia of the trenches and the impoverishment of visual experience facilitated certain geographies of senses that shaped male intimacies, what might similar emotional terrains look like for airmen exposed to more expansive visual practices?     

Food on the Borderlands: Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary and the Kentucky Home Front, 1860–1862

The diary of Johanna Louisa ‘Josie’ Underwood (1840–1923), the daughter of Kentucky lawyer, politician and plantation owner Warner Underwood, portrays what happened to many elite households in Kentucky during the American Civil War (1861–1865), especially with its depiction of food as a scarce, and thus increasingly valuable, resource. Spanning the first two years of the conflict, Josie’s diary is essentially a war narrative written by a well-educated, articulate, outspoken, Unionist woman from a slave-owning family who was barely out of her teens when the fighting began. As she reveals through her entries, her state and in particular her hometown of Bowling Green, was a ‘hotbed of political and military action’, and at the centre of this ‘hotbed’ of activity was food. Often historians think about wartime hunger as a function of the later years of the war, but as Josie’s diary elucidates, food scarcity was an immediate and constant issue. Consequently, food became an important commodity in the borderlands during the war, especially in occupied cities like Bowling Green, where it was a vital, yet elusive, military and civilian resource which, when accessed and controlled, functioned as social currency and a political symbol of power, especially for women.     

Attlee,Bevin, and Political Warfare: Labour's Secret Anti-Communist Campaign in Europe, 1948–51

Clement Attlee's Labour Government oversaw the emergence of a vigorous anti-Communist discourse and the establishment of an anti-Soviet Western alliance in the early Cold War. In January 1948, the Prime Minister authorised the Information Research Department to launch a political warfare offensive designed to combat the spread of Communism in Europe. Two years later, against the wishes of his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Attlee set up a high-level interdepartmental committee to oversee the subversion of the Soviet Union's position in Eastern Europe. These developments forced Whitehall to re-fight the bureaucratic battles of the Second World War over who actually controlled covert warfare. Bevin, like his predecessor Anthony Eden, fought unsuccessfully to maintain exclusive ownership of national security strategy in this area. Attlee ended his monopoly by making a rare but significant intervention in his Foreign Secretary's domain in the search for a new central machine to fight the Cold War.     

Obstruction as Power: Rethinking Britain's Caucasus Occupation 1918–20

This article draws on French and British archival sources to rethink the history of Britain's 1918--1920 occupation of the Caucasus. The extant historiography casts London as eager to reinvigorate the region's oil exports in order to buoy its own supplies, but this article suggests that various elements within and close to the British administration sought to obstruct oil exports. Preventing Caucasus oil from reaching global markets seems to have helped parts of the British administration reach their aims during negotiations with the French government and Royal Dutch Shell. It also improved the viability of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company by denying valuable oil supplies to rival firms. Acknowledging the British oil interests that steered state policies during this period allows a richer story to unfold, one that demonstrates how imperial power in the wake of the Great War could be brought to serve the aims of, and even adopt the methods of, transnational oil companies operating in an emerging global fuel market.     

‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

“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.     

But There Was No War: The Impossibility of a United States Invasion of Canada after the Civil War

The notion that the United States threatened to invade the Canadian colonies after the Civil War persists to this day. Alleged British and Canadian support for the Confederate States angered Washington so much that Canadians feared military action. This menace started the Confederation movement that created the Dominion in 1867. This article argues otherwise by pointing to the careful diplomacy during the war—and rapid changes afterwards—each worked against the threat of a war. Tensions rose and fell with events such as the Trent Affair of 1861 and the St. Albans Raid of 1864, but each country otherwise sought to avoid trouble. Neither side deployed troops to the border during the war. After Appomattox, Union soldiers headed north but only to return home. Demobilization, combined with military deployments to the former Confederacy and the West, and resolute diplomacy afterwards, further prevented conflict. Not even the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870 could disturb the peace.     

What Can Be Learned from Shell Fragments? Examples from World War II Battlefields in the Maritime Alps

Shells were the most deadly weapon used during the conflicts of the twentieth century involving industrialized nations. Astronomical numbers of them were produced and fired, making shell fragments the most common artefact to be found on modern battlefields. An understanding of shell fragments can therefore be useful to the battlefield archaeologist. This paper discusses the three main components of artillery shells and mortar shells: the body, the fuse and the rotating band for artillery shells or the tail-fin assembly for mortars. Analysing the fragments of these components can provide important information, including nationalities, types, and calibres of shells used in an area. Body fragments are the least useful, but can prove helpful if they are large, or contain markings, threads, or fragments of band seat. Rotating band fragments are extremely characteristic as well as easy to find, and a single fragment is usually sufficient to determine the exact type of shell it came from. Tail-fin assemblies are also specific of the mortar shell they were used on. Fuses are typically covered with highly informative markings such as dates of manufacture, lot numbers, or factory codes. Because the information derived from the analysis of various shell fragments is a cheap and relatively easy way to help maximize the understanding of a battlefield that is being investigated, any archaeologist working on a modern battlefield should familiarize themselves with this topic.     

Beyond Recall: Searching for the Remains of a British Secret Weapon of World War I

This article discusses the development of the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, a massive British flamethrower that was used against German trenches in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Built underground within tunnels below No Man’s Land, this secret weapon was an attempt to use technology to break through German defences and reduce British casualties. The flame projector was the most effective flamethrower developed in WWI, but proved to be too inflexible and expensive to be widely used.