The European Defence Community

Author(s):  
Richard Griffiths

In 1950, France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries started talks that would culminate in a treaty for a European Defence Community (EDC), a treaty that was signed but never ratified. The initiative for a common European army was the French response to the American demand for a rearmed Germany. Against the background of the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950 and the numerical superiority of Soviet conventional ground forces on the European continent, US President Truman wanted to see the major increase in US defense capacity in Europe compensated by an equivalent effort in Europe, including a rearmament of Germany. For France, such rearmament, only five years after the end of World War II, was politically unacceptable. With the support of Jean Monnet, Prime Minister René Pléven proposed a scheme for a European army operating within the framework of a single political and military authority. The plan included a European defense minister, appointed by national governments and responsible to a Council of Ministers and a European Assembly. While each state would retain national defense and command structures, there would be no German defense ministry or army. The German troops would be recruited directly into the European army. The Treaty creating a European Defence Community was signed in Paris on May 27, 1952, by all six negotiation parties (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and Germany), but was not ratified by France, the initiator of the initiative. On August 30, 1954, the French Assembly decided not to put the EDC treaty to a vote, meaning that it in effect rejected the proposal for a European army. The problem of German rearmament was ultimately addressed by admitting West Germany into the Western Union, which was renamed the Western European Union, and by welcoming it as a member of NATO.

Polar Record ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 21 (135) ◽  
pp. 559-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Selinger ◽  
Alexander Glen

By autumn 1940 the first round of fighting in World War II was over. In northern Europe, German forces occupied Poland, Norway and Denmark. Both sides recognized that further operations demanded naval and air superiority in northern waters. Germany needed free access to the Atlantic Ocean through the North Sea; Britain had to prevent that access, which threatened the lifeline to the United States. More than ever before, it became essential for both sides to have meteorological information from the northern Atlantic Ocean area. Germany's need was especially acute, for the routes for her shipping from ports in Scandinavia traversed enemy-patrolled waters, where foul weather was essential for evasion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (02) ◽  
pp. 214-225
Author(s):  
Sergey Kulik ◽  
Аnatoliy Kashevarov ◽  
Zamira Ishankhodjaeva

During World War II, representatives of almost all the Soviet Republics fought in partisan detachments in the occupied territory of the Leningrad Region. Among them were many representatives of the Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Many Leningrad citizens, including relatives of partisans, had been evacuated to Central Asia by that time. However, representatives of Asian workers’ collectives came to meet with the partisans. The huge distance, the difference in cultures and even completely different weather conditions did not become an obstacle to those patriots-Turkestanis who joined the resistance forces in the North-West of Russia.


Elements ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitri Phillips

The history of England did not begin with the Industrial Revolution and not everything supposed about the Anglo-Saxons reduces to the myth of King Arthur and the Round Table. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, the Dark Ages of the North were full of splendor and brilliance; the only thing dark about them is their enshrouded history, but that only makes them all the more fascinating. The great burial mound at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia, discovered just before World War II, shines as one of the most grandiose sepulchers in history, yet the identity of its occupant remains a mystery. Was it a wealthy merchant, a warrior from overseas, or a great king? This paper gathers, presents, and scrutinizes the evidence and arguments from ancient records, opulate grave-goods, and contemporary investigations in an attempt to determine the most likely candidate for the individual interred in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Jane Lydon

Xavier Herbert published his bestseller Capricornia in 1938, following two periods spent in the Northern Territory. His next major work, Poor Fellow My Country (1975), was not published until thirty-seven years later, but was also set in the north during the 1930s. One significant difference between the two novels is that by 1975 photo-journalism had become a significant force for influencing public opinion and reforming Aboriginal policy. Herbert’s novel, centring upon Prindy as vulnerable Aboriginal child, marks a sea change in perceptions of Aboriginal people and their place in Australian society, and a radical shift toward use of photography as a means of revealing the violation of human rights after World War II. In this article I review Herbert’s visual narrative strategies in the context of debates about this key historical shift and the growing impact of photography in human rights campaigns. I argue that Poor Fellow My Country should be seen as a textual re-enactment, set in Herbert’s and the nation’s past, yet coloured by more recent social changes that were facilitated and communicated through the camera’s lens. Like all re-enactments, it is written in the past conditional: it asks, what if things had been different? It poses a profound challenge to the state project of scientific modernity that was the Northern Territory over the first decades of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Stanislav Polnar

Since the end of World War II, the investigation of anti-state delinquency of military personnel was realised by the military intelligence. It originated with Czechoslovak military units in the USSR and were influenced by Soviet security authorities. After 1945 and 1948 these bodies remained in the structure of the Ministry of National Defense, but from the beginning of the 1951 they moved to the structure of the Ministry of the Interior following the Soviet model. The legal status of these bodies was always unclear and did not correspond to the legal regulation. Another important article in the investigation of the political delinquency of soldiers was the military prosecutor’s office as part of the socialist-type prosecutor’s office, which was subjected to general trends in the regulation of criminal proceedings.


This chapter sets the stage for DRTE’s linking of nature and technology by examining anxieties about ionosondes — the chief instruments of ionospheric research. The ionosondes that emerged from World War II could not be trusted to capture rapidly-changing high-latitude phenomena. The chapter focuses on the efforts of Frank Davies and the Radio Physics Laboratory to create a coherent group of instruments, collectively responsible for mapping northern sectors of the global ionosphere. In doing so, it illustrates how efforts to standardize ionospheric equipment, as well as the multiple meanings of that standardization, opened up important possibilities for variation and difference in international collaborations. For Frank Davies and his group, the machines and the records they produced became a way of solving all-too-local problems with the North as a place of experiment and with the people occupying it.


Author(s):  
Jason G. Strange

The second of three chapters exploring the history of homesteading in the area around Berea, Kentucky, chapter 3 presents the story of rural subsistence from the late 1800s up to the economic boom generated by World War II. The chapter is framed in terms of the “parable of enclosure”--the idea that yeoman farmers would not voluntarily trade independent livelihood for capitalist wage labor--and argues that as industry and technology generated ever more advanced consumer goods (for example, refrigerators, radios, antibiotics), the peasant way of life became outmoded; once wage labor became available in the factories of the north, millions of Appalachians left the mountains. But, as the chapter documents, some chose to return to a homesteading life, forming an overlooked back-to-the-land movement.


Author(s):  
Lars Öhrström

The two men in white anoraks were slowly approaching, skiing in the bitter cold over the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in the winter of 1943. Were they friends or foes? This was a matter of life and death for the six young men watching the only other living beings in sight for miles of snow-clad wilderness. Their pace was slow, the men were thin and didn’t look too well, just as if they might well have spent 130 days of the winter of 1942–43 hidden in a rudimentary hut on the mountain, surviving on moss and poached reindeer. It had to be them. The group’s leader, Joachim Rønneberg, decided to make contact. This story is first a tragedy and then a success, and it does not begin on the Hardangervidda but in Scotland where Britain’s ski capital, the small town of Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park, is going to be our starting point for several dangerous journeys across the North Sea. A few years ago we drove up the main mountain road, eventually leading to the Cairn Gorm peak itself, 4,084 feet (1,245 metres) above sea level, and passed the park’s visitors’ centre located in pretty surroundings by a small lake. We glimpsed something flapping in the wind that did look a bit like the Union Jack, an unlikely occurrence in the highlands. We turned around and took the path up the hill, and soon discovered that what we first mistook for the British ensign, because of its colours, was in fact the Norwegian national flag. In 1468, when the Norwegians gave away their last Scottish possessions to King James III in Edinburgh, the Norwegian flag had not even been invented, so we were a wee bit curious as to why it was flying here, in the heart of the Cairngorms. But of course, mountains, snow, and skiing—what could be more Norwegian? And this simplistic reasoning is actually closer to the answer than we might have thought, as a commemorative sign told us that on this spot were the lodgings of the famous Kompani Linge during World War II.


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