Brothers in Arms?

2021 ◽  
pp. 344-369
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military ◽  
Race War

Chapter 9 looks at what happened to the US military’s white-nonwhite lines as American troops moved overseas during World War II. Nonblack minorities faced both bright and blurry white-nonwhite lines when deployed abroad. At times, the military remained determined to uphold distinctions between whites, on the one hand, and Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, on the other. This determination, evident in everything from military justice proceedings to promotion patterns, stemmed primarily from long-standing civilian investments in these distinctions and in response to the vicious race war in the Pacific with Japan. At the same time, overseas service also witnessed the continued blurring of white-nonwhite lines—the transformation of “Mexicans,” “Puerto Ricans,” “Indians,” “Filipinos,” “Chinese,” and even “Japanese” into whites’ buddies and brothers, comrades and fellow Americans, deepening a process that had begun on the home front. While this overseas blurring often emanated from day-to-day battlefield bonding, it was America’s military leaders and commanders who largely made it possible. In doing so, they narrowed the white-nonwhite divide, but also deepened the black-white one in the process.

The Revolution in Military Affairs and Strategic Thought in the US Military, 1991–2003

2019 ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Peter R. Mansoor
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
American Military ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Revolution In Military Affairs ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

A recurring theme of post-World War II US military history is the fixation of American policy-makers on technological solutions to strategic challenges. In the wake of the 1991 victory in the Gulf War, American military leaders embraced a Revolution in Military Affairs combining guided munitions with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems to provide war-winning capabilities for US forces. Although Army experimentation in the 1990s and early 2000s had much to commend it, senior Army leaders lost sight of the connection between strategy and military operations and virtually ignored any type of war other than the one for which the Army's powerful conventional forces were designed. In the aftermath of regime change in Iraq in 2003, US commanders struggled to develop concepts suitable to achieve the nation's strategic goals. Having all but ignored other types of conflict, Army leaders proved incredibly resistant to embracing counterinsurgency operations in Iraq until defeat stared them in the face. In the future, the US Army needs to integrate information networks, ISR systems, and guided munitions into a broader warfighting framework that military leaders can adapt to whatever type of enemies they may face, rather than counting on fighting a mirror-imaged enemy.

The Reluctant Warrior

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-103
Author(s):  
Andrew T. McDonald ◽  
Verlaine Stoner McDonald
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Military ◽  
Race War

Chapter 4 describes Rusch’s experience from the time of his repatriation to the United States to his service as a personnel officer for the Military Intelligence Service Language School. Rusch’s task was to recruit Japanese Americans for the U.S. Army, where they would learn Japanese to serve the war effort. Rusch was also part of a speaker’s bureau, through which he would appear at public functions to discuss Japan’s military capabilities. On some occasions, before audiences of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Rusch spoke against America’s policy of interning Japanese Americans. But more often than not, Rusch’s remarks mirrored American policy and sentiments of the day, calling for the fiery destruction of Japan’s militarist regime, which he acknowledged would require the killing of Japanese civilians. At other times, Rusch used his position to implore army officers to treat Nisei soldiers as individuals, not as members of another race. Occasionally, Rusch spoke of World War II in terms of a race war, of Japanese leaders bent on expelling Caucasians from Asia, casting Americans in the role of the fearless pioneers who fought off Native Americans to secure their westward expansion. Rusch remained committed to returning to help Japan rebuild after the war.

II. Caspian Energy: Oil and Gas Resources and the Global Market

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-406
Author(s):  
Mehdi Parvizi Amineh ◽  
Henk Houweling
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
International System ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Oil And Gas Resources ◽  
The Military

AbstractThis article develops several concepts of critical geopolitics and relates them to the energy resources of the Caspian Region. Energy resources beyond borders may be accessed by trade, respectively by conquest, domination and changing property rights. These are the survival strategies of human groups in the international system. The article differentiates between demand-induced scarcity, supply-induced scarcity, structural scarcity and the creation, respectively, transfer of property rights. Together, the behaviors referred to by these concepts create a field of social forces that cross state borders involving state and a variety of non-state actors. During World War II, the US began to separate the military borders of the country from its legal-territorial borders. By dominating the world's oceans, the Anglo-Saxon power presided over the capacity to induce scarcity by interdicting maritime supplies to allies and enemies alike. Today, overland transport increasingly connects economies and energy supplies on the Eurasian continent. The US has therefore to go on land in order to pre-empt the land-based powers from unifying their economies and energy supplies.

scholarly journals Messages from the ‘Older Brother’: Djawa Baroe and the Japanese Propaganda in Indonesia (1943-1945)

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Putut Widjanarko
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
Original Intention ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Military

The Japanese occupation of East Asia during World War II was accompanied by its propaganda targeted to the local population. In Indonesia, the military government, among other things, published Djawa Baroe, a fortnightly magazine published from January 1, 1943 to August 1, 1945.Compared to other magazines, this bilingual magazine (in Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia) Djawa Baroe was unique: it featured ample photographs and illustrations. Qualitative content analysis method enables this study to find the meaning of a theme in its holistic political, social, and cultural contexts beyond the number of its occurrences in the text offered by quantitative content analysis. All the issues of Djawa Baroe are examined in detail and reiteratively. Six themes can be found in Djawa Baroe, i.e., the friendship between Japanese and Indonesians, the description of Japanese military prowess, the exaltation of nationalism and the preparation for the war, the evil nature of Western power, the role of women in society, and entertainment. The study concludes that along with the development of the Pacific War that turned against the Japanese, Djawa Baroe moved its emphasis on long-range goals at the high psychological level to influence and win the hearts and minds of Indonesian people, to a more immediate result and practical guide in facing the imminent war. On the other hand, against the original intention of the Japanese propaganda, Djawa Baroe may have helped its educated readers to imagine their future nation-state, Indonesia. Keywords: Djawa Baroe; Wartime propaganda; Japanese occupation; nation-building

Deploying Jim Crow

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-343
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Home Front ◽  
The Other ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

Chapter 8 explores what happened to the US military’s black-white lines as American troops moved overseas. On the one hand, the US military transplanted these lines all around the world. While not identical to those on the home front, they also took multiple forms, involving everything from jobs and dances to courts-martial and minstrel performances. They also stemmed from the military’s paradoxical goals of winning a war for democracy while at the same time protecting white supremacy. On the other hand, fully achieving this latter goal became more difficult overseas because of locals’ warm relations with black Americans, the black-white comradeship of some American GIs, and the activism of black troops. Taken together, these developments chipped away at the black-white divide. At war’s end, Jim Crow in uniform was far from dead, but it lay moderately wounded just the same.

John Useem and Governance Operations

2018 ◽  
pp. 199-238
Author(s):  
Montgomery McFate
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Successful Case ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Navy ◽  
Government Enterprise ◽  
The Military

This chapter concerns the wartime civil affairs experience of John Useem, a US Navy officer who became the military governor of a small island in Micronesia. While the post-World War II, military government established in Germany and Japan are often offered as examples of successful governance operations, the partially successful case of Micronesia better exemplifies the paradoxes at the heart of the military government enterprise. These issues which plagued the US military government in Micronesia, and which John Useem wrote about in the 1940s and 1950s, were the exact same issues that have plagued the intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq more than a half century later. What happens when the policy of democratization is incompatible with the existing social order? What happens when American social norms conflict with the society they intend to govern? What happens when the core principle of military government non-interference cannot be implemented in practice and outright contradicts the imperatives of ‘nation building’?

On “Nationalism and the Imagination”

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 504-506
Author(s):  
Jean Franco
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Memories ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Military ◽  
Depression Era

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.

Factionalism Among Syrian Nationalists During the French Mandate

1981 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip S. Khoury
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
French Mandate ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military

It is ironic and perhaps telling that the one national independence movement largely ignored by historians of the Arab Middle East is the Syrian nationalist movement. The irony, of course, is that the birthplace of Arab nationalism was Syria; it was to Damascus that Arab nationalists in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere looked for inspiration, guidance, and moral support in the interwar period; and out of the Syrian movement sprang the radical nationalism of the Ba'thists. Intellectual histories of the precursors, birth, and content of Arab nationalism abound, and, insofar as these histories deal with the birthplace of Arab nationalism, they must discuss Damascus and Syria just prior to and during World War I. But once the intellectual birth of Arab nationalism has been discussed, interest in the history of Syria wanes to be revived only after World War II, with the emergence of Ba'thism and the military in politics. What follows is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the nature and organization of the Syrian national independence movement; rather, it is a preliminary investigation of some salient characteristics of the politics of Syrian-Arab nationalism in the early years of the French Mandate.

Edward M. Almond and the US Army

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Greatest Generation ◽  
Virginia Military Institute ◽  
The Us ◽  
Military Institute ◽  
The Military

This biography examines the long career of Lt. Gen. Edward M. Almond, who was born to a family of modest means in rural Virginia. His early education at the Virginia Military Institute, steeped him in Confederate lore and nurtured his “can do” attitude, natural aggressiveness, demanding personality and sometimes self-serving nature. These qualities later earned him the sobriquet “Sic’em, Ned,” which stuck with him for the remainder of his career. Almond commanded the African-American 92nd Infantry Division during World War II. The division failed in combat and was re-organized, after which it contained one white, one black, and the Army’s only Japanese-American (Nisei) regiment. The years since that war have seen the glorification of the “Greatest Generation,” with all racist notions and ideas “whitewashed” with a veneer of honor. When war came to Korea, Almond commanded X Corps in the Inchon invasion, liberation of Seoul, race to the Yalu. When the Chinese entered the war and sent the US Army into retreat, Almond mounted one of the largest evacuations in history at Hungnam -- but not before the disaster at Chosin claimed the lives of hundreds of soldiers and marines. This book reveals Almond as a man who stubbornly held onto bigoted attitudes about race, but also exhibited an unfaltering commitment to the military profession. Often viewed as the “Army’s racist,” Almond reflected the attitudes of the Army and society. This book places Almond in a broader context and presents a more complete picture of this flawed man yet gifted officer.

Science With a Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences after World War II

1993 ◽  
Vol 61 (9) ◽  
pp. 860-861
Author(s):  
David H. DeVorkin ◽  
Frank C. Jones
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Space Sciences ◽  
The Military
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