scholarly journals Landscapes of Internment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Grady
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Improvement Measures ◽  
Surrounding Landscape ◽  
First World

AbstractDuring the First World War, all of the belligerent powers interned both civilian and military prisoners. In Britain alone, over one hundred thousand people were held behind barbed wire. Despite the scale of this enterprise, interment barely features in Britain's First World War memory culture. By exploring the place of prisoner-of-war camps within the “militarized environment” of the home front, this article demonstrates the centrality of internment to local wartime experiences. Forced to share the same environment, British civilians and German prisoners clashed over access to resources, roads, and the surrounding landscape. As this article contends, it was only when the British started to employ prisoners on environmental-improvement measures, such as land drainage or river clearance projects, that relations gradually improved. With the end of the war and closure of the camps, however, these deep entanglements were quickly forgotten. Instead of commemorating the complexities of the conflict, Britain's memory culture focused on more comfortable narratives; British military “sacrifice” on the Western Front quickly replaced any discussion of the internment of the “enemy” at home.

Societies at War, 1914–1918

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Goebel
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Mass Entertainment ◽  
First World

This essay explores how Europeans experienced the First World War. Consent in wartime was generated from the bottom up rather than choreographed by the state. Civil society and commercial mass entertainment played a vital role in sustaining morale among civilians and the troops. Far from being alienated from each other, people in and out of uniform remained in constant communication. Moreover, the drive towards ‘total war’ broke down the barrier between military and non-military spheres and transformed enemy civilians into targets and one’s own civilians into an important resource. Atrocities were committed, people at the home front attacked from the air, civilians forced to flee their homes, soldiers brutalized and prisoners of war maltreated; and yet, the war cannot be described as an unmitigated demographic catastrophe. To be sure, it left a legacy of mass bereavement and a memory culture that endured long beyond the caesura of 1918.

The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rawlinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter explores how Anglophone literature and culture envisioned and questioned an economy of sacrificial exchange, particularly its symbolic aspect, as driving the compulsions entangled in the Second World War. After considering how Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories cast light on the Home Front rhetorics of sacrifice and reconstruction, it looks at how poets Robert Graves, Keith Douglas, and Alun Lewis reflect on First World War poetry of sacrifice. With reference to René Girard’s and Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war, I take up Elaine Cobley’s assertion about the differing valencies of the First and Second World Wars, arguing that the contrast is better seen in terms of sacrificial economy. I develop that argument with reference to examples from Second World War literature depicting sacrificial exchange (while often harking back to the First World War), including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), and William Wharton’s memoir Shrapnel (2012).

End of War or End of State? 1918 in the Public Memories of Post-Communist Croatia and Serbia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen ◽  
Ismar Dedović
Keyword(s):  
Public Memory ◽  
Positive Outcome ◽  
First World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
War Memory ◽  
The Public ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Abstract This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.

scholarly journals “Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Sinai Peninsula ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
War Machine ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

The “knowledge front”, women, war and peace

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Horne
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
World War ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Medical Researcher ◽  
First World

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of university-educated women in an examination of the First World War and its aftermath. The paper explores the professional lives of two women, the medical researcher, Elsie Dalyell, and the teacher, feminist and unionist, Lucy Woodcock. The paper examines their professional lives and acquisition and use of university expertise both on the war and home fronts, and shows how women’s intellectual and scientific activity established during the war continued long after as a way to repair what many believed to be a society damaged by war. It argues that the idea of “knowledge front” reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace, and offers “space” to examine the professional lives of university-educated women in this period. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured as an analytical narrative interweaving the professional lives of two women, medical researcher Elsie Dalyell and teacher/unionist Lucy Woodcock to illuminate the contributions of university-educated women’s expertise from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War. Findings The emergence of university-educated women in the First World War and the interwar years participated in the civic structure of Australian society in innovative and important ways that challenged the “soldier citizen” ethos of this era. The paper offers a way to examine university-educated women’s professional lives as they unfolded during the course of war and peace that focuses on what they did with their expertise. Thus, the “knowledge front” provides more ways to examine these lives than the more narrowly articulated ideas of “home” and “war” front. Research limitations/implications The idea of the “knowledge front” applied to women in this paper also has implications for how to analyse the meaning of the First World War-focused university expertise more generally both during war and peace. Practical implications The usual view of women’s participation in war is as nurses in field hospitals. This paper broadens the notion of war to see war as having many interconnected fronts including the battle front and home front (Beaumont, 2013). By doing so, not only can we see a much larger involvement of women in the war, but we also see the involvement of university-educated women. Social implications The paper shows that while the guns may have ceased on 11 November 1918, women’s lives continued as they grappled with their war experience and aimed to reassert their professional lives in Australian society in the 1920s and 1930s. Originality/value The paper contains original biographical research of the lives of two women. It also conceptualises the idea of “knowledge front” in terms of war/home front to examine how the expertise of university-educated career women contributed to the social fabric of a nation recovering from war.

Voluntarism and the impact of the First World War

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Grant
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Director General ◽  
World War ◽  
Voluntary Activity ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Relief Fund ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World ◽  
Voluntary Organisations

This chapter considers the experience of the First World War to demonstrate that state mobilisation does not necessarily crowd out voluntary endeavour. While the scale of volunteering to fight in that conflict has long been appreciated, the equivalent voluntary effort on the home front has been neglected by historians. This chapter charts the scale, coordination and regulation of this voluntary activity, from the establishment of the National Relief Fund, to the appointment of a Director General of Voluntary Organisations in 1915 and the 1916 War Charities Act. It is argued that the War encouraged professionalisation and innovation within the charity sector, while also embedding a notion of voluntarism working hand in hand with the state.

III Woolton at the Ministry of Food

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-70
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Food Control ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

The Ministry of Food was essentially created during the War, and survived until it was reabsorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture in 1958. It has been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly interest as part of research into the management of the Second World War on the Home Front. Lessons about food control had been learned from the experiences of the First World War, which were consciously applied to this war. This was in part because so many of the men had been involved in that conflict in some way, including Woolton himself. They had personal memories of what had worked well then, but were also very aware of the mistakes that had been made, which they did not wanted repeated. Woolton certainly was, as his ...

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