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This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.
country. Collaboration with neighboring countries assisted in maximizing the U.S.-led efforts. For example, both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan permitted the use of their air bases, while Turkmenistan opened up a land corridor to the troops and permitted over-flights that carried humanitarian supplies. In return for the cancellation of a considerable amount of its debt, Pakistan permitted the use of selected bases as staging areas, as well as granting over-flight rights. In light of the porous nature of its western border with Afghanistan, the sympathetic Pakistani
ministers and officials seemed to hope? In its forceful push to develop new bases for a continuously expanding presence, the United States seemed to provide the answer to that question. From the outset, the East Anglian airfields, close to the North Sea and lying outside the coverage of Britain’s south-east oriented air defence screen, were judged vulnerable to pre-emptive strikes by the Soviet Air Force. Additional locations were required, and through the early 1950s the US developed and further improved a number of centrally located air bases primarily in Introduction
would be implicated in any future nuclear exchange. The corollary of the American readiness to go nuclear at the outset from English air bases was that these in turn would be an immediate target for Soviet air attack. England could be defended – but only for a while. A short-range emergency war plan formulated in 1948 envisaged five bomber groups and one fighter group operating from the UK during the initial phase of a conflict. After 12 days, none would still be there.1 The war plan envisaged that the UK would have to be held for that period as a staging and
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
, expensive improvements were required to bring them up to modern heavy bomber standards, with secure storage for nuclear weapons. Additional locations were required, and through the early 1950s the US sought to develop and improve a number of centrally located air bases in the south Midlands on the understanding that the UK government would meet their share of the cost and derive a longterm benefit. In their reluctance to squeeze money for this purpose from shrinking budgets, British civil servants, and Treasury civil servants in particular, took their cues from
projected chain of air bases from the Cape to Singapore. The Cardwell system required that British battalions at home and in India be organized on a similar basis: the Trenchard system of imperial defence likewise required overseas squadrons to be interchangeable. Trenchard opposed a suggested increased in the Indian squadrons from twelve to eighteen aircraft partly because this would sacrifice the
, wartime manufacturing sites, military roads, military recruitment centres on town high streets, and checkpoints in areas such as the West Bank, as well as military bases, battlefields, air bases, navy bases, and fortifications.4 But whilst recognizing the flexible definitions of militarized environments, I adopt a narrower approach in this book to make it manageable and coherent. My focus is on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war.5 They include
meetings, Crawley circulated a memorandum to the Cabinet Defence Committee summarising reasons why the Americans should be refused permanent air bases in the UK. When judged against the matters that were at stake in this crucial period of rapidly mounting hostility between the Soviet Union and the West, his case for refusal was couched in terms that were, probably deliberately, trivial. First, argued Crawley, a permanent American presence might cause ‘bad feeling’ among people living near the airfields if they recalled that US military personnel were better paid than
with imperial propaganda. But the airline was not alone in the sky or on the ground. In the 1920s, the Royal Air Force was a conspicuous British representative abroad, its air bases strong evidence of a presence, and its formation flights (and bombs) an unmistakable sign of order and power. In addition, several individual pilots made remarkable flights across the British Empire. The first of these, in