War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-War (July, 2008)

Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $100.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by: Mark R. Hatlie, History and Government Program, University of Maryland University College, Europe Division.

War and Memorial Culture

This study of the casualties of war offers a broad overview of the cultural meaning and impact of mass wartime death in the West over the past 150 years or more. "Did the brutality, the suddenness, the sheer numbers of those killed change the relationship with death in the West?" (p. xi). The period covered by the book is the same as that of other recent studies of modern war and memorial culture, extending from the French Revolution through the wars of the twentieth century, but emphasizing primarily the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. These years were a period during which a tension arose between a greater political and social concern for the individual on the one hand and developments in military technology and practice which killed unprecedented numbers and, often, did so in such a way that the dead were also not only distant, but often physically obliterated, depriving the bereaved of bodies to mourn.

War Dead defines "Western societies" in a refreshingly broad manner, including not only western Europe and North America, but also South America, primarily the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. Indeed, these last cases promise to open up recent studies on wartime death and dying to a new cultural context. However, most of the examples and analysis are taken from France during and following the world wars, especially World War I. The authors include scattered examples from the Franco-Prussian War and the colonial wars of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from other countries such as Germany, Spain, and Britain and even one or two anecdotes from Soviet experience. South America gets, in the end, relatively little attention, however. Thus, this study remains rooted in western Europe and does not radically break with works such as those by George Mosse, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, or Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann. The other examples, however, serve to show that some patterns and conclusions are indeed more broadly applicable ...

REVIEW: Owen Dudley Edwards, British Children's Fiction in the Second World War

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (March 2008)

Owen Dudley Edwards. _British Children's Fiction in the Second World War_. Societies at War Series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. vi + 744 pp. Illustrations, figures, index. $200.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7486-1651-0.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Stephen Heathorn, Department of History, McMaster University

Too Many Fairies and Not Enough Tale

If one word could possibly sum up a 744-page book, then in this case I would have to say it would have to be "indulgence." I must admit up front that it took me a long time to read Owen Dudley Edwards's _British Children's Fiction in the Second World War_, and despite the interesting topic, I am not sure it was worth the effort. It is not that Edwards writes poorly or has little of interest to say. On the contrary, every page is filled with learned allusions, wit, and genuine insight, and his primary research has been prodigious. The problem is that this research and the insights gleaned
from it are not presented in an intellectually disciplined manner. Edwards has crammed into his book every last fact, every last supposition, and every last connection he has discovered in the course of reading his sources. This indulgence--and that of his editors and of the press--makes for a massive and unwieldy tome that, unfortunately, is sometimes rather tedious to wade through. The indulgence in description, extensive quotation and allusion--and, frankly nostalgia--where explicit argument and synthesizing analysis were called for, diminishes the impact of what might otherwise have been an excellent book.

Although the works of over a hundred authors are mentioned or discussed in passing, the key protagonists of Edwards's tale are really Enid Blyton, W. E. Johns, Richmal Crompton, E. M. Brent-Dyer, and Frank Richards. The others--including such literary heavyweights as J. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and George Orwell--are more or less the supporting cast, discussed to illuminate specific issues rather than the main theme of the book. That theme can be summarized as follows: the war was a time of relaxed or absent parental control, and British children inhabited a world, therefore, in which they were particularly susceptible to the messages of the popular literature and commercialized juvenile culture on which they, by necessity of parental relaxation/absence, relied to make sense of their world. So, Edwards's argument--implicit in a number of statements spread through the book rather than explicitly detailed--is that children's fiction, especially that of Blyton, Johns, and Crompton, provided "resources" for children to "manage" their experience of war. I find this instrumental view of children's literature a more contentious proposition than does Edwards, and because he does not explicitly explore or defend his argument empirically or theoretically, I do not find that his view ultimately carries much conviction ...

REVIEW: Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Stefan Goebel. _The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940_. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xviii + 357 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $ 90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-85415-6.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Antoine Capet, University of Rouen, France

Some Are More Medievalist than Others

It is clear from his stated objectives as indicated in the introduction that the author set himself a very ambitious task, from at least two points of view. First, because the general theme of the book is not one with which most readers are _prima facie_ familiar: "The 'medievalising' of the memory of the Great War is the subject-matter of this study. It argues that the Middle Ages figured centrally in the remembrance of the First World War in both Britain and Germany between 1914 and 1940" (p. 1). Second, because, as Stefan Goebel himself admits, the book "ventures into a significantly underdeveloped field of historical enquiry: empirical comparative history" (p. 6). Mastering the subject and the enormous historiography of First World War memory in Britain or Germany was already a considerable difficulty, which he chose to compound by covering both countries, fully aware of the pitfalls, since he writes that "the comparative historian of the First World War seems to tread a tightrope between emphasizing European convergences, national
peculiarities, or sectional diversities within nations" (p. 10).

Goebel's approach is clearly influenced by Pierre Nora's _Lieux de memoire_ (1984-1992). Those who are familiar with the work or its translations will remember that the "sites of memory" in question go much further than mere places and buildings, to include all elements of culture. Here, of course, lies the first major difficulty as the signifiers "culture" in English and "Kultur" in German do not have the same signified notions, with "Kultur" including references to Germanity which "culture" does not have in English for Britishness. Since, not unexpectedly, he founds his reasoning on the chivalrous ideals of the Middle Ages, Goebel draws a constant implicit comparison between the exploitation of the Knights of the Round Table in Britain and the Teutonic Knights in Germany. But as the very expression "the Arthurian legend" immediately suggests, the Knights of the Round Table are not "history"--at best they are "cultural history"--admittedly a British _lieu de memoire_ in Pierre Nora's wide acceptation of the notion, but evidently not with the same grounding in the national historical awareness as the "real" Teutonic Knights ...

REVIEW: A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-Albion (November, 2006)

A. N. Wilson. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. xii + 609 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography index. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-374-10198-5.

Reviewed by: Rohan McWilliam, Department of History, Anglia Ruskin University.

A. N. Wilson and Edward, George, Edward, George

A. N. Wilson is a force of nature. Novels, histories, journalism, and biographies leap from his Chestertonian pen along with the odd bon mot and a delight in troublemaking. A self-appointed chronicler of English manners and foibles, he writes from the not unfertile position of the conservative maverick. By this I mean that he displays an affection for national institutions and traditions, but he is not deceived about their shortcomings and limitations. He celebrates the pragmatists rather than the ideologues and is ever willing to expose the distance between soaring rhetoric and sordid deeds.

A sequel to Wilson's Victorians (2002) (whose subject I suspect was more to his taste), After the Victorians is very much a popular history written for a non-academic audience and should be assessed as such. Like the earlier volume, this is intended as a "portrait of an age." It covers the years from Victoria's death in 1901 to the accession of Elizabeth II. Wilson's waggish agent apparently suggested that the book should be titled "Edward, George, Edward, George" after the monarchs in between. The English paperback edition has been given the subtitle, The World Our Parents Knew, which perhaps explains Wilson's attraction to the subject but which does not give much away about the contents of the book. The subtitle of the American edition is The Decline of Britain in the World which is not much more helpful as the issue of "decline" is ever present but never discussed in a coherent way, although the book ends predictably with Dean Acheson's observation that, after the Second World War, the British lost an empire and failed to find a role (p. 528) ...

REVIEW:Guy Westwell, War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (October 2006)

Guy Westwell. _War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line_. Short Cuts Introduction to Film Studies Series. London: Wallflower, 2006. 133 pp. Illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 1-904764-54-1.

Reviewed for H-War by Lisa Mundey, U.S. Army Center of Military History

A Militant Hollywood

_War Cinema_ is part of the Short Cuts Series, a sequence of compact introductory survey texts for various aspects of film studies.  Guy Westwell, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at London Metropolitan University, provides a well-researched survey of contemporary war film scholarship, particularly focused on American cinema.  It is primarily geared toward students of film studies and popular culture.  Given the target audience, Westwell assumes the reader is familiar with such ideas as Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities," Antonio Gramsci's theory on hegemony, and other critical discourses.  He also presumes that the readers have a basic knowledge of film terminology and concepts, such as "genre" and "auteur," and American history.  Nevertheless, the text is not overly laden with jargon, so a non-expert can understand it. 

Westwell rejects the idea that war films are entertainment and argues that cinema and audiences have a complex relationship, which he describes as a cultural imagination about war.  In _War Cinema_, Westwell constructs a history of twentieth-century film cycles, capturing Hollywood's changing cultural imagination about war. Reflecting the overall state of film scholarship and his own predisposition, Westwell critiques Hollywood for its tendency to mythologize, construct myopic nationalistic interpretations, and produce pro-war films ...

REVIEW: Mona L. Siegel, The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-Peace (July, 2006)

The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge,. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiv + 334 pp. Illustrations, maps. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-83900-0.

Reviewed by: Kevin J. Callahan, Department of History, Saint Joseph College.

Pacifists and Patriots: Irreconcilable Differences or Myth versus Reality?

Mona L. Siegel has written an excellent book on the complex relationship between pacifist activism and commitment to the ideals of internationalism and patriotism. It has been a widely held view by contemporary critics and subsequent scholars that interwar French pacifism--in this case the anti-war agitation of French primary schoolteachers--was largely responsible for France's devastating defeat against the German Wehrmacht in 1940 by enervating the will of the French people. Conversely, Siegel argues that interwar pacifist schoolteachers preached a type of pacifism firmly anchored in French republican patriotism. As a result, pacifist instruction in classrooms across France actually solidified rather than undermined loyalty to the nation.

Beyond convincingly proving her thesis, Siegel has done much more that makes her monograph impressive. Firstly, the book treats several topics of historical interest with complexity and nuance such as the shifting French national memory of World War I and the impact of gender on political ideology. As such, there is much in this book of value for scholars whose interest may not reside in French history, the history of pacifism, or the history of education. Secondly, Siegel's methodology combines the best of social and cultural historical approaches. On the one hand, Siegel provides the reader with detailed information about French primary schoolteachers, their male-dominated union, the curriculum, and actual examples of classroom lessons and student assignments. On the other hand, Siegel enters the realm of publishing and public reception, discourse and visual analysis, and the political culture of war. For the last, Siegel writes that it was the aim of pacifist instruction "to destroy the mental arsenal of concepts and beliefs that had made war imaginable and, ultimately acceptable" (p. 3). Thirdly, the author draws upon a rich treasure trove of primary sources like history textbooks, national pedagogical journals, teacher lesson plans, children's school essays, and interviews with former schoolteachers. In addition, the author integrates superbly the most recent scholarship in French history. The overall result is a book of impeccable scholarship with a wide appeal ...

MOVIE REVIEW: Flags of Our Fathers

A Ghastly Conflagration, a Tormented Aftermath

By Manohla Dargis

New York Times

Published: October 20, 2006

It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. "Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.

The film distills much of the material covered in James Bradley and Ron Powers’s affecting book of the same title about the raising of the American flag during the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr. Bradley’s father, John Bradley, nicknamed Doc and played by an effectively restrained Ryan Phillippe, was one of six men who helped plant the flag (it was the second planted that day) on the island’s highest point on the fifth day of the monthlong American offensive. An Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, immortalized the moment, and American politicians seized the day, sending the three surviving flag raisers — Doc, Ira Hayes Adam Beach, delivering heartbreak by the payload) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — on a hugely successful war-bond drive.

The Gallica Collection: WWI

An extraordinarily large and rich collection of original color photography from 1914-1918, c/o, originally,  Gallica, a website of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France .

America in Color

Some great color images of America from 1939-1943, c/o the Library of Congress.

REVIEW: Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (April, 2006)

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. viii + 250 pp. Bibliography, index. $28.99 (paper), ISBN 0-521-61633-6.

Reviewed by: Kevin Mason, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Different Generations' Perspectives of World War I

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost analyze a multitude of books on World War I written by French, British and German scholars in order to show patterns of themes and methods over time. The authors set themselves a daunting task, as their comparative study considers not only the work of historians, but also encompasses literary works, television shows, films and museums. The book's cover page has a picture of a cemetery with books as tombstones, portraying the countless numbers of books already written on the Great War. Even though most of the writings on the First World War focus on military, political and diplomatic history, the authors add social, cultural and economic history. The work presents a multi-disciplinary, multi-national and multi-methodological approach. Prost and Winter argue that books and films on World War I can be grouped into three different generations (pp. 1-5). The book, originally published in French, examines how seven major themes (diplomatic and economic histories and the histories of generals, soldiers, workers, civilians and memory) have been treated within this three-generation framework. Although the authors leave out some works, do not fully state the arguments of each historian, and force the history of memory and that of workers into a slightly uncomfortable framework, they offer an outstanding historiographical study.

Prost and Winter argue that three different generations interpreted the war within "three historiographical configurations" (p. 31). The first, which they have called the "Generation of 1935," understood events in a nineteenth-century context. These scholars emphasized the nation and wrote history from the top down. The second generation, which witnessed World War II, described the Great War as a "tragedy played out by powerful collective actors: soldiers, workers, civilians" (pp. 200, 203). Finally, the third generation has turned toward cultural history and micro-historical analysis. According to Winter and Prost, regardless of which generation historians belong to, three questions reoccur again and again: "Why and how did the war break out? How was it conducted; how was it won and lost? What were its onsequences?" ...