scholarly journals Surgery on the battlefield: Mobile surgical units in the Second World War and the memoirs they produced

2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110121
Author(s):  
Katherine M Venables
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Head And Neck ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Base Hospital ◽  
Surgical Units ◽  
War Stories ◽  
Second World

In the Second World War, there was a flowering of the battlefield surgery pioneered in the Spanish Civil War. There were small, mobile surgical units in all the theatres of the War, working close behind the fighting and deployed flexibly according to the nature of the conflict. With equipment transported by truck, jeep or mule, they operated in tents, bunkers and requisitioned buildings and carried out abdominal, thoracic, head and neck, and limb surgery. Their role was to save life and to ensure that wounded soldiers were stable for casualty evacuation back down the line to a base hospital. There is a handful of memoirs by British doctors who worked in these units and they make enthralling reading. Casualty evacuation by air replaced the use of mobile surgical units in later wars, throwing into doubt their future relevance in the management of battle wounds. But recent re-evaluations by military planners suggest that their mobility still gives them a place, so the wartime memoirs may have more value than simply as war stories.

scholarly journals A Spanish Genocide? Reflections on the Francoist Repression after the Spanish Civil War

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIUS RUIZ
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Military Justice ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Relative Decline ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.

scholarly journals Knocking on America's door. Basque Foreign Politics in the US during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War (1936-1945)

2020 ◽  
pp. 983-1010
Author(s):  
David Mota Zurdo
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Federal Bureau ◽  
World War ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Foreign Politics ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
Second World

Este artículo analiza la denominada estrategia atlantista y cómo fue puesta en práctica por el Gobierno Vasco en el exilio a través de dos grandes etapas: por un lado, las actividades de la delegación del Gobierno Vasco en Nueva York durante la Guerra Civil española, atendiendo a su origen, composición, actuación y relación con instituciones norteamericanas como la National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), el Departamento de Estado y sus diferentes agencias. Y, por otro, se estudian las labores de lobbying vascas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Un periodo clave, pues, como se verá en las siguientes páginas, durante aquellos años se produjo una colaboración efectiva entre las instituciones vascas y las agencias estadounidenses de la Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), la Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), la Office of Strategic Services (OSS) y el Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav Successor States

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-281
Author(s):  
Vjeran Pavlaković
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Resistance Movement ◽  
Second World

Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.

scholarly journals Su segunda posguerra : los refugiados republicanos en el sur de Francia, 1945-1947

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Cervera Gil
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Great Portion ◽  
The Way

Cuando terminó la Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939) los derrotados republicanos tuvieron que tomar el camino del exilio y una gran parte de ellos fijaron su residencia en Francia. El estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue entendido por la mayoría de estos exiliados españoles como la continuación de la lucha que hasta meses antes habían desarrollado en España. Por ello, muchos antifranquistas se implicaron en la resistencia contra los nazis creyendo que su victoria sobre ellos sería continuada inevitablemente por el fin del Régimen de Franco, aliado del Eje y por tanto enemigo de los Aliados.When finished the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the defeated republicans had to take the way of the exile and a great portion of them took their residence in trance. The out break of the Second World War was understand by the most of these spanish exiled as the fight continuation that unta months before had developed in Spain. For it, many antifranquists helped in the resistance versis the nazis thinking that their victory over them would be continued for the end of Franco's Regime axis allied, and so allied enemy.

Trajectories of Transnational Antifascist Volunteers from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-345
Author(s):  
Nir Arielli ◽  
Enrico Acciai
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Organizations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Second World

This is an introduction to a special issue on the role played by veterans of the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigades during the Second World War. It argues that the study of these veterans is worthwhile for three reasons: the extraordinary mobility that the antifascist struggle of the years 1936–45 enabled; the microcosm it provides for the assessment of what happens when ideologically fuelled concerns meet pragmatic wartime needs; and the relevance of how governments and military organizations have dealt with suspect returnees in the past for present-day dilemmas that several governments face.

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