Muted Spectacles: Wartime Sounds, Aerial Warfare, and the Limits of the Visual

Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-182
Author(s):  
Maryam Philpott
Keyword(s):  

Heritage ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 753-781
Author(s):  
Dirk HR Spennemann

Military terrain analysis serves as a tool to examine a battle commander’s view of a battlefield and permits to hindcast some of the rationale for actions taken. This can be augmented by physical evidence of the remains of the battle that still exist in the cultural landscape. In the case of World War II-era battlefields, such terrain analysis has to take into account the influence of aerial warfare—the interrelationship between attacking aircraft and the siting of anti-aircraft guns. This paper examines these issues using the case example of the Japanese WWII-era base on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska).


1945 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Robinson

International law was no more prepared for the dynamics of the present war than was the Maginot school of military strategy. International lawyers had given little serious thought to the legal problems which total war would bring. Consequently, while international arrangements were concluded on special questions (e.g. on aerial warfare), the main body of the 1907 Hague Convention, including the section dealing with military occupation,remained unchanged. Military occupation was still conceived of as a temporary phenomenon with limited objectives. But totalitarian warfare as waged by the Axis powers has had unlimited objectives, aimed at nothing less than the complete political and economic subjugation of the occupied territory. In practice the enemy has recognized no restraints of either law or custom save the threat of immediate retaliation. Far from “respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country,” as the Hague regulations require, the Axis has systematically destroyed the political and legal order in the occupied territories. It has substituted quislings in the place of duly constituted local authorities, and has employed them for economic as well as political ends.


Author(s):  
Andrew Preston

The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial issues in 1968. The intense and polarised debate between anti-war demonstrators and defenders of the Vietnam War cast a shadow on US foreign policy, engendering what came to be termed the “Vietnam Syndrome” amongst policy-makers and the public. This chapter assesses the legacies of pro- and anti-war activism, arguing that the debates that took place during the late 1960s remained relevant long after US troops had left Indochina. Yet the possibility that direct action could prevent or divert American military intervention diminished over time due to two fundamental adjustments made in the wake of the turmoil of Vietnam: the end of the draft and the shift to an all-volunteer military; and a revolution in military affairs that used advanced technology to wage aerial warfare in place of the mass deployment of ground troops. Resistance to the Vietnam War thus had an ironic long-term effect: the US government found a way both to intervene militarily and blunt the effectiveness of popular antiwar protest.


Author(s):  
Christine Froula

While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.


1941 ◽  
Vol 181 (9) ◽  
pp. 119-119
Author(s):  
E. H. Blakeney
Keyword(s):  

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