World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension

Brings together geographies and methodologies often kept apart by the difficulties of researching such a broad-ranging topic as the war Shots in the Dark offers cutting-edge scholarship across different subfields in World War II history, revealing new insights into how this crucial conflict was planned, experienced, and fought. Twelve chapters demonstrate the broad scope of wartime innovation and how the war functioned as a global turning point, driving change at all levels of human society, from government institutions to individual identities. Contributors collaborated in a vibrant workshops series sponsored by the North American branch of the Second World War Research Group (SWWRGNA), an organization that emerged to nurture scholarship on the global war and unite scholars fragmented in narrower regional and methodological "stovepipes" to consider the war as a whole. The SWWRGNA and this volume showcase the work of diverse historians across subfields-operational, cultural, gender, social, intelligence, and diplomatic history. This approach exposes the Second World War as a catalyst for overlapping global changes that revolutionized the world after 1945. These scholars reveal continuities and parallels in wartime experiences that would remain invisible in narrowly focused projects. The volume establishes three frameworks for understanding and interpreting changes the war provoked: 1) institutional adaptation, 2) "totalization," or the militarization of civilians, and 3) cultural transformation. Each of the three frameworks is explored from four vantage points. Geographies are deliberately contrasted within each framework to examine the broad scope of that level of war-driven change.

"Fighter-Writer" reports from major battles in the Pacific highlight what America's Marines endured in World War II Douglass K. Daniel presents a fascinating trove of previously classified material withheld from the public because of government and public relations concerns at the time, including tactical details that could inadvertently aid the enemy, battlefield gore that could disturb readers, and the gamut of issues of taste. Navy censors in the field and editors at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington were also on alert for any material that could negatively affect the Corps itself or the overall war effort. Soul-searching stories that questioned the nature of war were rejected lest they sow doubt stateside about the cause for which so many lives were being lost. Behind the bylines was a new breed of storytellers. Considered "fighter-writers," Marine combat correspondents, or CCs, carried typewriters as well as weapons. The Marine Corps Division of Public Relations recruited them from America's newsrooms to join the fight that stretched from Guadalcanal and the bloody assault on Tarawa to the black sands of Iwo Jima and the dense jungles of Okinawa. Their approved work appeared in civilian newspapers, magazines, and other national and local media. This collection also highlights the unique efforts of the CCs and the public relations officers who commanded them. While they were assigned to report and write, they were Marines first. They eagerly put aside their notebooks to take up arms against the enemy as needed. Many were wounded in battle, and more than a dozen were killed, giving their lives to get the story behind the most significant conflict in human history.

How America's greatest marketing triumph in World War II shaped race, ethnicity, and class in modern America The World War II Bond Campaign is a history of the World War II bond drive led by the federal government, an effort called the most successful marketing operation in history. By the war's end, some 85 million Americans had spent $186 billion in an unprecedented outpouring of patriotism that contributed to the military victory and the prosperity of the following decades. The FDR administration used bonds to raise capital to support the war and promote national unity within the context of the nation's increasingly pluralistic society as the "melting pot" theory was retired. African Americans, Euro-Americans, and labor union members enthusiastically bought bonds to express national loyalty but also to demonstrate racial, ethnic, or class pride, a reflection of their dualistic or "hyphenated" identities. Drawing on various primary sources, The World War II Bond Campaign illustrates how the Trea­sury Department's multicultural marketing strategies tapped into Americans' aspirations alongside their patriotic impulses. Citizens of all social and economic backgrounds eagerly responded to what can be seen as the selling of America, making the subject an ideal lens to view national identity at a critical moment in the country's history. The author contends that the drive's success helped pave the way for the emergence of both the civil rights movement and the vigorous consumer culture of the postwar years.

Angelo Tasca, a pivotal figure in 20th-century Italian political history, and indeed European history, is frequently overshadowed by his Fascist opponent Mussolini or his Socialist and Communist colleagues (Gramsci and Togliatti). Yet, as Emanuel Rota reveals in this captivating biography, Tasca-also known as Serra, A. Rossi, André Leroux, and XX-was in fact a key political player in the first half of the 20th century and an ill-fated representative of the age of political extremes he helped to create. In A Pact with Vichy, readers meet the Italian intellect and politician with fresh eyes as the author demystifies Tasca's seemingly bizarre trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime. Rota demonstrates how Tasca, an indefatigable cultural operator and Socialist militant, tried all his life to maintain his commitment to scientific analysis in the face of the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, but his struggle ended in a personal and political defeat that seemed to contradict all his life when he lent his support to the Vichy government. Through Tasca's complex life, A Pact with Vichy vividly reconstructs and elucidates the even more complex networks and debates that animated the Italian and French Left in the first half of the 20th century. After his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party as a result of his refusal to conform to Stalinism, Tasca reinvented his life in Paris, where he participated in the intense political debates of the 1930s. Rota explores how Tasca's political choices were motivated by the desperate attempt to find an alternative between Nazism and Stalinism, even when this alternative had the ambiguous borders of Vichy's collaborationist regime. A Pact with Vichy uncovers how Tasca's betrayal of his own ideal was tragically the result of his commitment to political realism in the brief age of triumphant Fascism. This riveting, perceptive biography offers readers a privileged window into one of the 20th century's most intriguing yet elusive characters. It is a must-read for history buffs, students, and scholars alike.

When literary biographer and memoirist Louise DeSalvo embarked upon a journey to learn why her father came home from World War II a changed man, she didn't realize her quest would take ten years, and that it would yield more revelations about the man-and herself-and the effect of his military service upon their family than she'd ever imagined. Although DeSalvo at first believes she wants to uncover his story, the story of a man who was no hero but who was nonetheless adversely affected by his military service, she learns that what she really wants is to recover the man that he was before he went away. As DeSalvo and her father uncover his past piece-by-piece, bit-by-bit, she learns about the dreams of a working-class man who entered the military in the late 1930s during peacetime to better himself, a man who wanted to become a pilot. She learns about what it was like for him to participate in war games in the Pacific prior to the war, and its devastating toll. She learns about what it was like for her parents to fall in love, set up house, marry, and have children during this cataclysmic time. And as the pieces of her father's life fall into place, she finds herself finally able to understand him.

Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. “Against Redemption” concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy's transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country's break with Mussolini's regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.

This set of essays offers new insights into the journalistic process and the pressures American front-line reporters experienced covering World War II. Transmitting stories through cable or couriers remained expensive and often required the cooperation of foreign governments and the American armed forces. Initially, reporters from a neutral America documented the early victories by Nazi Germany and the Soviet invasion of Finland. Not all journalists strove for objectivity. During her time reporting from Ireland, Helen Kirkpatrick remained a fierce critic of that country's neutrality. Once the United States joined the fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American journalists supported the struggle against the Axis powers, but this volume will show that reporters, even when members of the army sponsored newspaper, Stars and Stripes were not mere ciphers of the official line. African American reporters Roi Ottley and Ollie Stewart worked to bolster the morale of Black GIs and undermined the institutional racism endemic to the American war effort. Women front-line reporters are given their due in this volume examining the struggles to overcome gender bias by describing triumphs of Thérèse Mabel Bonney, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, and Anne Stringer. The line between public relations and journalism could be a fine one as reflected by the U.S. Marine Corps' creating its own network of Marine correspondents who reported on the Pacific Island campaigns and had their work published by American media outlets. Despite the pressures of censorship, the best American reporters strove for accuracy in reporting the facts even when dependent on official communiqués issued by the military. Many wartime reporters, even when covering major turning points, sought to embrace a reporting style that recorded the experiences of average soldiers. Often associated with Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin, the embrace of the human-interest story served as one of the enduring legacies of the conflict. Despite the importance of American war reporting in shaping perceptions of the war on the home front as well as shaping the historical narrative of the conflict, this work underscores how there is more to learn. Readers will gain from this work a new appreciation of the contribution of American journalists in writing the first version of history of the global struggle against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy.

This book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II. “Breaking Point” is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author's personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and military policymakers, it begins with Franklin Roosevelt's endorsement of a universal Selective Service psychiatric examination followed by Army and Navy pre-and post-induction examinations. Ultimately, 2.5 million men and women were rejected or discharged from military service on neuropsychiatric grounds. Never before or since has the United States engaged in such a program. In designing “Selective Service Medical Circular No. 1”, psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan assumed psychiatrists could predict who might break down or falter in military service or even in civilian life thereafter. While many American and European psychiatrists questioned this belief, and huge numbers of American psychiatric casualties soon raised questions about screening's validity, psychiatric and military leaders persisted in 1942 and 1943 in endorsing ever tougher screening and little else. Soon, families complained of fathers and teens being drafted instead of being identified as psychiatric 4Fs, and Blacks and Native Americans, among others, complained of bias. A frustrated General George S. Patton famously slapped two "malingering" neuropsychiatric patients in Sicily (a sentiment shared by Marshall and Eisenhower, though they favored a tamer style). Yet psychiatric rejections, evacuations, and discharges mounted. While psychiatrist Roy Grinker and a few others treated soldiers close to the front in Tunisia in early 1943, this was the exception. But as demand for manpower soared and psychiatrists finally went to the field and saw that combat itself, not "predisposition," precipitated breakdown, leading military psychiatrists switched their emphasis from screening to prevention and treatment. But this switch was too little too late and slowed by a year-long series of Inspector General investigations even while numbers of psychiatric casualties soared. Ironically, despite and even partly because of psychiatrists' wartime performance, plus the emotional toll of war, postwar America soon witnessed a dramatic growth in numbers, popularity, and influence of the profession, culminating in the National Mental Health Act (1946). But veterans with "PTSD," not recognized until 1980, were largely neglected.

The story of the origin of Vatican Radio provides a unique look at the history of World War II The book offers the first wide-ranging study on the history of Vatican Radio from its origins (1931) to the end of Pius XII's pontificate (1958) based on unpublished sources. The opening of the Secret Vatican Archives on the records regarding Pius XII will shed light on the most controversial pontificate of the 20th century. Moreover, the recent rearrangement of the Vatican media provided the creation of a multimedia archive that is still in Fieri. This research is an original point of view on the most relevant questions concerning these decades: the relation of the Catholic Church with the Fascist regimes and Western democracies; the attitude toward anti-Semitism and the Shoah in Europe, and in general toward the total war; the relationship of the Holy See with the new media in the mass society; the questions arisen in the after-war period such as the Christian Democratic Party in Italy; the new role of women; and anti-communism and the competition for the consensus in the social and moral order in a secularized society.

A critical introduction to how the Nagasaki atomic bombing has been remembered, especially in contrast to that of Hiroshima. In the decades following the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the city's residents processed their trauma and formed narratives of the destruction and reconstruction in ways that reflected their regional history and social makeup. In doing so, they created a multi-layered urban identity as an atomic-bombed city that differed markedly from Hiroshima's image. Shadows of Nagasaki traces how Nagasaki's trauma, history, and memory of the bombing manifested through some of the city's many post-atomic memoryscapes, such as literature, religious discourse, art, historical landmarks, commemorative spaces, and architecture. In addition, the book pays particular attention to how the city's history of international culture, exemplified best perhaps by the region's Christian (especially Catholic) past, informed its response to the atomic trauma and shaped its postwar urban identity. Key historical actors in the volume's chapters include writers, Japanese- Catholic leaders, atomic-bombing survivors (known as hibakusha), municipal officials, American occupation personnel, peace activists, artists, and architects. The story of how these diverse groups of people processed and participated in the discourse surrounding the legacies of Nagasaki's bomb­ing shows how regional history, culture, and politics-rather than national ones-become the most influential factors shaping narratives of destruction and reconstruction after mass trauma. In turn, and especially in the case of urban destruction, new identities emerge and old ones are rekindled, not to serve national politics or social interests but to bolster narratives that reflect local circumstances.

Offers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world's largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on Anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. ‘Beyond Hostile Islands” contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the “tyranny of distance,” Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, “Beyond Hostile Islands” puts forward the term 'ideological coproduction' to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.

Allied Encounters uniquely explores Anglo-American and Italian literary, cinematic, and military representations of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique, and move beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has conditioned understandings of the Allied–Italian encounter. The arrival of the Allies' global forces in an Italy torn by civil war brought together populations that had long mythologized one another, yet "liberation" did not prove to be the happy ending touted by official rhetoric. Instead of a "honeymoon," the Allied–Italian encounter in cities such as Naples and Rome appeared to be a lurid affair, where the black market reigned supreme and prostitution was the norm. Informed by the historical context as well as by their respective traditions, these texts become more than mirrors of the encounter or generic allegories. Instead, they are sites in which to explore repressed traumas that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered, including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers.

Uniquely Okinawan explores how American soldiers, sailors, and Marines considered race, ethnicity, and identity in the planning and execution of the wartime occupation of Okinawa, during and immediately after the Battle of Okinawa, 1945—46.

Sheds new light on the mistreatment of downed airmen during World War II and the overall relationship between the air war and state-sponsored violence. Throughout the vast expanse of the Pacific, the remoteness of Southeast Asia, and the rural and urban communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, more than 120,000 American airmen were shot down over enemy territory during World War II, thousands of whom were mistreated and executed. The perpetrators were not just solely fanatical soldiers or Nazi zealots but also ordinary civilians triggered by the death and devastation inflicted by the war. In Forgotten Casualties, author Kevin T Hall examines Axis violence inflicted on downed Allied airmen during this global war. Compared with all other armed conflicts, World War II exhibited the most widespread and ruthless violence committed against airmen. Flyers were deemed guilty because of their association with the Allied air forces, and their fate remained in the hands of their often-hostile captors. Axis citizens angered by the devastation inflicted by the war, along with the regimes' consent and often encouragement of citizens to take matters into their own hands, resulted in thousands of Allied flyers' being mistreated and executed by enraged civilians. Written to help advance the relatively limited discourse on the mistreatment against flyers in World War II, Forgotten Casualties is the first book to analyze the Axis violence committed against Allied airmen in a comparative, international perspective. Effectively comparing and contrasting the treatment of POWs in Germany with that of their counterparts in Japan, Hall's thorough analysis of rarely seen primary and secondary sources sheds new light on the largely overlooked complex relationship among the air war, propaganda, the role of civilians, and state-sponsored terror during the radicalized conflict. Sources include postwar trial testimonies, Missing Air Crew Reports (MACR), Escape and Evasion reports, perpetrators' explanations and rationalizations for their actions, extensive judicial sources, transcripts of court proceedings, autopsy reports, appeals for clemency, and justifications for verdicts. Drawing heavily on airmen's personal accounts and the testimonies of both witnesses and perpetrators from the postwar crimes trials, Forgotten Casualties offers a new narrative of this largely overlooked aspect of Axis violence.

The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of 362 American journalists accredited to cover the European Theater of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war's end. Radio was relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during that period is that many potential primary documents-their live broadcasts-were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War, Cassidy's censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. James Cassidy was ambitious and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to augment dry facts. All of Cassidy's stories, from the panic he felt while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter's lean and engaging prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a "bottom-up" narrative that provides insight into war as fought and chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl wailed "Les Américains partent!" when Allied troops retreated to safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war, which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his "Murrow's Boys."

Discover the chilling untold story of sexual forced labor in Nazi concentration camps In his seminal work, The Concentration Camp Brothel, Robert Sommer reveals the hidden hor­rors of sexual forced labor within the SS camp system, a subject long overshadowed and seldom acknowledged in the discourse on the Holocaust. Through his rigorous examination of over seventy archives and poignant interviews with more than thirty survivors, including former visitors of camp brothels, Sommer paints a vivid and harrow­ing picture of the atrocities committed. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive exploration of the establishment, operation, and profound impact of brothels in Nazi concentration camps. Sommer's research meticulously details the brothels' integration into the concentration camp system, their role in the Nazi exploitation of bodies for control and profit, and the complex reac­tions of the prisoner society to these establishments. He explores the desperate survival strategies employed by the women forced into sexual labor and the chilling motivations of their exploiters. The book also places the tragedy of camp brothels in the broader context of sexual violence under Nazi rule, making a critical connection between these acts of exploitation and the overall history of the Holocaust. This updated English edition incorporates new findings and perspectives since the original German publication in 2009, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. The foreword by Annette F. Timm adds further context and contemporary analysis, enhancing the book's relevance and depth.