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Chapter 23 The Second World War The Second World War witnessed the greatest propaganda battle in the history of warfare. For six years, all the participants employed propaganda on a scale that dwarfed all other conflicts, including even the First World War. There were several reasons why this was so. In the first place, this was a war between entire nations, even more so than in 1914-18. In the totalitarian nations, coercion had replaced consultation in the political process, democracy had been dismantled and the masses subjugated to the will of one party
The Second World War was not simply a European conflict, but a global, and specifically imperial, struggle. 1 Over half a million African troops from various dependencies fought for Britain during the war. 2 Yet in Southern Rhodesia the notion of training Africans how to use guns unnerved settlers who held on to perennial fears of rebellion against white rule. The total number of African males on full-time service was 15,153; but only 1,505 of them ever served outside Southern Rhodesia’s borders. Despite settler attempts to shield Africans from potentially
This book surveys the political, economic and social history of Northern Ireland in the Second World War. Since its creation in 1920, Northern Ireland has been a deeply divided society and the book explores these divisions, including loyalist and republican commemoration, IRA activity, policing, internment, preparations for war and the absence of consensus on the war itself. It examines rearmament in the 1930s, the relatively slow pace of wartime mobilisation, the impact of the blitz in 1941, as well as labour and industrial relations. Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK with a devolved government and no military conscription during the war. The book includes the debate on conscription, including the opposition of the Catholic Church, as well as the controversy on the formation of the Home Guard. The absence of military conscription made the process of mobilisation, and the experience of men and women, very different from that in Britain. There is also extensive coverage of wartime politics and social policy. As elsewhere in the UK, the war raised important questions about housing, crime, youth welfare, and led the broader debates on social policy following the 1942 Beveridge Report. The conclusion considers Northern Ireland in 1945 and how its government faced the domestic and international challenges of the postwar world.
French crime fiction and the Second World War explores France's preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of crime fiction, one of popular culture's most enduring literary forms. The study analyses representations of the war years in a selection of French crime novels from the late 1940s to the 2000s. All the crime novels discussed grapple with the challenges of what it means for generations past and present to live in the shadow of the war: from memories of French resistance and collaboration to Jewish persecution and the legacies of the concentration camps. The book argues that crime fiction offers novel ways for charting the two-way traffic between official discourses and popular reconstructions of such a contested conflict in French cultural memory.
Leeds Jewry on the eve of the Second World War By 1939, Jews had been living and working in Leeds for almost a century, with the largest influx between 1880 and 1914. There was still an older generation that remembered the move from Russia and Poland and spoke Yiddish, together with younger generations that had been born, educated and worked in Leeds. The Jewish population had spread from the Leylands to Chapeltown and Harehills, following the northern route from town up North Street, Chapeltown Road and
7 Male leisure and citizenship in the Second World War I t is perhaps fitting that in a book which considers male leisure and notions of citizenship, the final chapter should investigate the impact of the Second World War on working communities. Never before had the leisure of the working class been so systematically scrutinised by the state through a network of intelligence officers and researchers. The era of total war had propelled the civilian to centre stage and the British Government watched nervously to see how he or she would respond to enemy bombardment
against Britain, as Germans had good relations with it. I accepted the suggestion and secretly reached Ireland with other co-workers. 1 The onset of the Second World War furthered both Ireland’s and India’s national aspirations. In Ireland’s case the decision to adopt the policy of neutrality provided the final realisation of
Thousands of people died in Rotterdam during the Second World War in more than 300 German and Allied bombardments. Civil defence measures had been taken before the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and these efforts were intensified during the country’s occupation as Allied bombers attacked Rotterdam’s port, factories, dry docks and oil terminals. Residential neighbourhoods were also hit through imprecise targeting and by misfired flak grenades. Inadequate air raid shelters and people’s reluctance to enter them caused many casualties. The condition of the corpses and their post-mortem treatment was thus co-constituted by the relationship between the victims and their material circumstances. This article concludes that an understanding of the treatment of the dead after war, genocide and mass violence must pay systematic attention to the materiality of death because the condition, collection and handling of human remains is affected by the material means that impacted on the victims.
an impact on the mobilisation for suffering humanity. In the post-Second World War era, the emphasis placed on the ‘new beginning’ echoed and strengthened certain elements that had emerged in the past, first of all the appeal to modernisation. This term was understood as rationalisation, professionalisation, the use of science and technology as essential requisites for humanitarian work. In addition, the role given to the new intergovernmental bodies coincided with the insistence on the centrality of the institutions. Through their supervision and coordination
similar pattern. Initially, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement of 1955–68 was easily the most popular area of interest for researchers in the field, with the 1930s and the Second World War confined to the role of a poor relation. This imbalance is now not as great as it once was. Although the outpouring of work on the 1950s and 1960s remains considerable, there is greater interest by historians in studying developments in race relations in the preceding two decades. There are a number of reasons why earlier scholars neglected the 1930s and early 1940s