“A Most Disagreeable Problem”

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-194
Author(s):  
Marcus Faulkner
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Potential Threat ◽  
The North ◽  
Maritime Traffic ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Second World

In the vast literature concerning the German attack on Allied maritime communications in the Atlantic theater during the Second World War, one particular factor has received little to no consideration – the potential threat that German aircraft carriers posed to Allied naval operations and the passage of maritime traffic in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. While ultimately the Kriegmarine never fielded an operational carrier, such a development could not be discounted at the time. This chapter addresses what the British knew about the German effort and what implications this had on British strategy, naval planning, and fleet deployments. In covering these aspects, this chapter by Marcus Faulkner fills an existing gap concerning the Admiralty's perception and contributes to understanding the complexity of the maritime threat Britain faced during the war. It also illustrates the problems involved in evaluating enemy military capabilities and intentions on the basis of a very limited intelligence picture. This in turn helps historians understand why the Admiralty remained so apprehensive of the Kriegsmarine's surface fleet until 1943.

scholarly journals THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COALITIONAL INTERACTION IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR AS ONE OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC UNION FORMATION

2021 ◽  
Vol 02 (06) ◽  
pp. 91-98
Author(s):  
R.R. Marchenkov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

This article highlights the main milestones of Anglo-American coalition cooperation during the Second World War. The military-political aspect of cooperation is touched upon. An approach to the fusion of military mechanisms through the development of the idea of the qualitative use of the forces and means of the allies in compliance with the principle of unity of command is considered. It is concluded that certain fruits of cooperation between the Western allies, primarily within the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are taken into account in the post-war world. In addition, this article focuses on the position of the United Kingdom in terms of building a post-war security system.

Nato and Adenauer's Germany: Uneasy Partnership

1961 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 618-629
Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
North Atlantic Treaty Organization ◽  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Second World

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has played a central role in the regeneration of West Germany since die Second World War, with the accession of die Federal Republic to NATO in May 1955 marking the official return of Germany to the company of civilized nations. West Germany, in turn, has become a not inconsequential member of the treaty organization. The bulk of NATO'S defense forces is located in die Federal Republic; an increasing amount of NATO'S military contribution is German; and the most controversial issue in Europe confronting the organization stems direcdy from die division of Germany and the exposed position of Berlin.

The Need for West: Hans Kohn and the North Atlantic Community

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adi Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Geographic Locations ◽  
New West ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
East And West ◽  
Second World

In the writing of historian Hans Kohn (1891—1971) East and West were never geographic locations, but rather geographic metaphors. They were ideas, which served as his major tool of analysis throughout his career: in Habsburg Prague as a young spiritual Zionist; in Jerusalem in the 1920s as a ‘bi-national Zionist’; as comparative historian of nationalism as of the second world war; and finally as an American Cold Warrior. This article situates the evolution of Kohn’s notions of East and West in a primarily Jewish context, and toward a Cold War horizon. It also seeks to illuminate the genealogy of the ideas he propagated as a notable purveyor of Cold War ideology, particularly the need for a ‘New West’.

At Bletchley Park

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Copeland
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Machine Building ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Country House ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Army Air Force ◽  
Coded Messages ◽  
Second World

This chapter summarizes Turing’s principal achievements at Bletchley Park and assesses his impact on the course of the Second World War. On the first day of the war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire that served as the wartime HQ of Britain’s military codebreakers (Fig. 9.1). There Turing was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German forces’ typewriter-like cipher machine. Germany’s army, air force, and navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battlefronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in Allied hands—sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted. The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained, and on at least one occasion the English translation of an intercepted Enigma message was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it. Turing pitted machine against machine. Building on pre-war work by the legendary Polish codebreaker Marian Rejewski, Turing invented the Enigma-cracking ‘bombes’ that quickly turned Bletchley Park from a country house accommodating a small group of thirty or so codebreakers into a vast codebreaking factory. There were approximately 200 bombes at Bletchley Park and its surrounding outstations by the end of the war. As early as 1943 Turing’s machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month—two messages every minute. Chapter 12 describes the bombes and explains how they worked. Turing also undertook, single-handedly at first, a 20-month struggle to crack the especially secure form of Enigma used by the North Atlantic U-boats. With his group he first broke into the current messages transmitted between the submarines and their bases during June 1941, the very month when Winston Churchill’s advisors were warning him that the wholesale sinkings in the North Atlantic would soon tip Britain into defeat by starvation.

Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. xv + 360 pp. $42.50 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 224-226
Author(s):  
Peter Nekola
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
The European Union ◽  
World War ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The North ◽  
Second World

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Poland, one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's newest members and poised to enter the European Union sometime in the next few years, has begun perhaps one of its most stable periods in recent history. Divided for centuries between Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires, Poland was able to preserve its language and cultural identity until its independence in 1918. Of nations involved in the Second World War, Poland was perhaps the most thoroughly devastated by that conflict, emerging only to be locked under the strict gaze of Moscow until the beginning of the last decade. In the wake of 1989 and the opening of borders and archives across Central and Eastern Europe, the experience of Poland has much to teach us.

The Dominions and British Maritime Power in the Second World War

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-114
Author(s):  
Iain E. Johnston-White
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
North America ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

Often undervalued in the existing historiography of the Second World War, the dominions provided assistance to the UK in many ways that proved fundamental to British strategy. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how important this was in one such area—bolstering British maritime power. The most crucial support was provided by Canada in the North Atlantic. Canada helped maintain the link between North America and the UK, which was essential to both British survival and the capacity to maintain offensives. More surprisingly, the Union of South Africa had a vital role to fulfill on the Cape Route once the Mediterranean was effectively closed to Allied shipping. The island dominions of Australia and New Zealand could do little more than fall in line with Allied strategy, since the direction of the war to some extent marginalized the importance of their role in the British maritime effort. In the long attritional war at sea, the dominions proved foundational in their importance to British maritime power. This effort kept the Commonwealth connected during one of the most challenging phases of its existence.

Migrant Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Innes
Keyword(s):  
Professional Training ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
British And Irish Literature ◽  
Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
British Commonwealth Of Nations ◽  
Second World

This chapter discusses migrant fiction in British and Irish literature. The end of the Second World War and the closing stages of the British empire brought significant changes, making more complex the ambivalent attitudes of the British towards the peoples of what now became (in 1948) the British Commonwealth of Nations. As it was gradually acknowledged that the expatriate professional and administrative classes in the former empire would be replaced by indigenous persons, increasingly large numbers were sent from the colonies to acquire the British professional training and higher education often required for an appointment in their home countries. It is in this context that migrant fiction, both by and about immigrant communities, was created in Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. One response to the disorientation experienced in Britain was to recreate the community back home, to rediscover and understand what one had left.

scholarly journals The Women’s Question among the Masons of Russian Paris

Literary Fact ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 314-332
Author(s):  
Michela Venditti
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
National Library ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The North ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The article is a introduction to the publication of the minutes of the meetings of the Russian lodge "Northern Star" in Paris, concerning the discussion on the admission of women to freemasonry. The proposed archival materials, deposited in the National Library of France in Paris, date back to 1945 and 1948. The women's issue became more relevant after the Second World War due to the fact that Masonic lodges had to recover and recruit new adherents. The article offers a brief overview of the women's issue in the history of Freemasonry in general, and in the Russian emigrant environment in particular. One of the founders of the North Star lodge, M. Osorgin, spoke out in the 1930s against the admission of women. In the discussions of the 1940s, the Masonic brothers repeat his opinion almost literally. Women's participation in Freemasonry is rejected using either gender or social arguments. Russian Freemasons mostly cite gender reasons: women have no place in Freemasonry because they are not men. Freemasonry, according to Osorgin, is a cult of the male creative principle, which is not peculiar to women. Discussions about the women's issue among Russian emigrant Freemasons are also an important source for studying their literary work; in particular, the post-war literary works of Gaito Gazdanov are closely connected with the Masonic ideology.

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