War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Barbara G. Friedman, From the Battlefield to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946

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

Barbara G. Friedman. _From the Battlefield to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946_. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2007. ix + 134 pp. Bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0826217189.

Reviewed for H-War by Jenny Thompson, Curator of Education, Evanston History Center

Women's War

During and immediately following World War II, one million marriages between American soldiers and women from countries other than the United States took place. In Great Britain, where two million American soldiers were stationed or passed through during the war, the inevitable
"fraternization" between GIs and British women constituted a concern for the U.S. and British governments, a newsworthy and debated subject on the American home front, and a real experience for thousands of men and women caught in the realities of a world at war. By 1947, 70,000 British women had left England for the United States to join their American husbands, most sailing there on "bride ships." The U.S. government's passage of the War Brides Act in December 1946 paved their way to enter the United States as non-quota immigrants (p. 97). Barbara G. Friedman, assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores the subject of British war brides by examining how their stories were presented, interpreted, and ultimately, "co-opted" (p. 2) in British and American mass media.

Drawing from a variety of disciplines including history, sociology, and communication, Friedman's book is an excellent chronicle of media coverage of the war bride phenomenon, both in the United States and Great Britain. It is also a fascinating study of related issues, including U.S. and British attitudes and experiences during the war, dominant discourses on sexuality and marriage, and the ways that fears and concerns about women's roles during wartime played out in the public sphere ...

REVIEW: Gerald E. Shenk, "Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Minerva@h-net.msu.edu (October, 2007)

Gerald E. Shenk. _"Work or Fight!" Race, Gender, and the Draft in World War One_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 194 pp. Notes, index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-6175-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4039-6177-8.

Reviewed for H-Minerva by Richard S. Fogarty, Department of History,  University at Albany

Drafting Conformity

With the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1917, the United States adopted a new system of conscription to meet the challenges of full participation in Europe's Great War. While the U.S. military actually needed less than 10 percent of eligible men to serve in uniform, officials believed that the exigencies of modern total war required the utilization of all of the nation's productive capacities, both military and economic. The resulting policies, vividly distilled in the slogan "Work or Fight," sought to ensure that every available, healthy American male contributed to the war effort through uniformed service or labor deemed necessary to the prosecution of the war. However, Gerald Shenk's study of the draft during the First World War shows that the officials who administered the system, and the people who supported it in unofficial capacities, sought not only to mobilize the nation for war, but also to ensure "that millions of other men and women work to sustain the existing social order" (p. 2). In short, "the fundamental goals of draft officials at the local, state, and national levels were to protect privileges associated with property, patriarchy, and white supremacy, while providing men to fight the war" (p. 153).

Shenk's work is not a general history of the origins and operation of conscription during the war,[1] but an attempt to write "a multilayered portrayal and analysis of what the draft meant to Americans of all kinds where they lived their daily lives in their homes and communities" (p. 4). In particular, he investigates how the workings of the Selective Service System revealed the roles race, gender, and class played in American life in the early twentieth century, and how local attitudes about these issues affected the administration of conscription policies. To that end, Shenk has taken a case study approach, focusing on the implementation of policies at local and statewide levels in Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and California. The author employs this methodology presumably because it provides broad national coverage--of the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West--though he does not spend much space justifying this approach or explain fully why he chose these states, what makes them representative or good choices for closer examination. Still, the strength of the approach is to set these state and local stories against the broad background of the national war
effort, and the wide-ranging regional coverage allows the author to draw conclusions at both the macro and micro levels ...

REVIEW: Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton, eds, The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader

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

Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton, eds._The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader_.  New York: New York University Press, 2007. ix + 457 pp. Notes, suggestions for further reading, index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8147-5203-9; $26.00 (paper), ISBN 0-8147-5204-7.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Carol Taylor, Northeast Texas History and Genealogy Center

The Difficult Road to Peace

When the guns fell silent at Appomattox and other sites of Confederate surrender to the Union Army, the Civil War was technically over.  The Confederates were paroled and headed home, penniless and hungry in their threadbare clothing.  The Union Army was hastily marched to Washington, D. C., to parade in the Grand Review.  But the vast majority of those men were broke, some not having been paid for more than one year.  The Union Army had a plan to muster out its soldiers; the Confederates did not even have a government, much less a plan to return surviving soldiers to peaceful civilian life.  It is at that point that Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton pick up the fate of the Civil War veterans.

The editors have collected a wide range of essays from various disciplines to allow the reader to understand the "rich variety of attitudes, circumstances, and behaviors that historians and other scholars have found among the Civil War veterans” (p. 2).  As Logue and Barton explain, "the
veterans shared a profoundly important event, but the rest of their lives followed courses determined by a host of circumstances" (p. 5).  It is the host of circumstances that _The Civil War Veteran_ explores.  The book is divided into five parts, each focusing on a particular stage in the readjustment to civilian life.  Many of the essays could be placed in more than one part, but the arrangement that Logue and Barton chose works well and creates a flow into the next stage of veterans' experiences ...

REVIEW: Suzanne Mettler. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by:H-Pol (June, 2006)

Suzanne Mettler. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xvi + 252 pp. Appendices, notes, index, tables, figures, half-tones. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-518097-6.

Reviewed by: Stephen R. Ortiz, Department of History, East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Generating Citizens: Military Veterans, Public Policy, and Democratic Citizenship

One of the most exciting developments in the recent study of U.S. political history has been the renewal of the dialogue between political scientists and historians. Over the past twenty years, as political historians have increasingly focused on policy formation and implementation rather than the electoral and legislative processes, a growing number of political scientists have emphasized the historical dimensions of institutional development, especially the importance of historical contingency. These trends have led to the growth of a rich body of literature that engages both historians and political scientists, and blurs the disciplinary boundaries almost beyond recognition. U.S. political history--that fusty old don of academia--is now a surprising model of cutting-edge interdisciplinarity. One prominent scholar associated with this phenomenon, Suzanne Mettler, Alumni Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, already has made an important contribution with her work on the gendered structures undergirding New Deal public policy. Luckily for scholars of U.S. social policy, veterans' issues, and post-World War II political culture, Mettler employs her considerable talents in an excellent new study of the of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill.

In Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation, Mettler analyzes the impact of the G.I. Bill both on the veteran population that utilized the legislation's generous social provisions, and on postwar American politics and society. By utilizing extensive archival research and data from a series of surveys and interviews of World War II veterans, she argues that the G.I. Bill made a tremendous difference in the economic and social status of benefit recipients, and more importantly, led to a marked increase in recipients' levels of civic engagement. Mettler maintains that the bill's provisions, and the manner in which they were implemented, left lasting imprints on a cohort of veterans who had not only won the "good war," but who would also have the highest twentieth-century rates of political involvement. She explains, "Those veterans who utilized the [G.I. Bill] provisions became more active citizens in public life in the postwar years than those who did not" (p. 9). In other words, federal policies helped create the "greatest generation," a generation long venerated for its level of civic engagement and political participation. With this interpretive salvo, Mettler explicitly links two subjects of enormous historical and contemporary relevance: the impact of social policy on citizen beneficiaries and the decline of participatory democracy ...

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 ...

On to Iwo Jima!

Propaganda newsreel from Paramount, 1945.

Robert S. Burrell, Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology (excerpt)

The Journal of Military History 68.4 (2004) 1143-1186

Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology: A Strategic Study of Operation Detachment.

By Robert S. Burrell.

On 4 March 1945, fourteen costly days after Marines invaded Iwo Jima, a B-29 Superfortress ran short on fuel and asked permission to land on the island's ill-prepared airfield. One Marine combat correspondent explained what went through his mind as the B-29 landed:

Like a giant bird, it set down on Motoyama Airfield Number One. The B-29 landed on hallowed ground, volcanic ash surfaced with hard clay which recently had soaked in the blood of American Marines. . . . These Leathernecks from your and my hometowns made it possible for the B-29 to land here. Now, those lads are buried in the shadow of Mount Suribachi, where Old Glory flies from the crest, proclaiming to all that American Marines conquered the Japs who held the formidable volcano fortress.

In the first days of the battle, men argued over whether the island would have any "lasting military significance," but the appearance of the B-29 quelled all that. The euphoria of this initial event had an immediate impact on the high commands of the Army Air Forces, Navy, and Marine Corps. The media also quickly publicized the succession of B-29 landings, helping to create the myths that followed. The struggle for the island had achieved heroic proportions after the famous photograph of Marines raising the second flag on Mount Suribachi; consequently, romanticism drove the effort to justify the costs of the battle.

Almost every book, journal, and website that addresses the battle justifies the deaths of nearly 7,000 Americans at Iwo Jima with the "emergency landing theory." Essentially, the theory argues that 2,251 B-29 Superfortresses landed on Iwo Jima; each Superfort carried 11 crewmen; and accordingly, the capture of Iwo Jima saved the lives of 24,761 Americans. However, the emergency landing theory is largely myth. Just as scholars used it to solidify the case for the necessity of capturing Iwo Jima, the claim demonstrates the extent to which the battle has been misunderstood.

History has forgotten that not all Pacific War veterans agreed with the need for the battle. For example, during an interview concerning naval operations on Saipan, retired Admiral Charles S. Adair, a Navy captain in 1945 and a senior amphibious operations planner with the Pacific's Seventh Fleet, reflected about Iwo Jima: "I don't think Iwo Jima should have been taken, because of the cost to take it. And I don't think the value was there. I don't think it was needed, and if every plane that landed on Iwo Jima, that had to critically, were added up, and the pilots were added up, I'll bet they wouldn't anywhere near total 25,000." In current accounts of Iwo Jima, criticism like Adair's can no longer be heard. Over the years the legends of Iwo Jima have become America's reality.

A look into the planning for Iwo Jima demonstrates that the service rivalry resulting from the dual advances of the Navy and the Army in the Pacific negatively influenced the decision to initiate Operation Detachment (the code name for the Iwo Jima plan). The Navy, rather than waiting for the Army to complete its seizure of the Philippines in 1944 and release the ground forces needed to invade Formosa, made a hasty change in plans between 29 September and 2 October and decided to seize Okinawa instead, thereby continuing its advance without delay. Although Okinawa satisfied the Navy's purposes, the simultaneous proposal to seize Iwo Jima actually derived from the strategy of the Army Air Forces, which wanted to improve the strategic air campaign against Japan by providing fighter support from Iwo Jima for the B-29 Superfortresses based in the Mariana Islands (Saipan, Tinian, and Guam). The combined objectives of Okinawa and Iwo Jima ensured approval by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This alliance between the Navy, which was seeking to outflank the Army, and the Army Air Forces, which wanted to prove the case for strategic bombing in order to create an independent postwar service, satisfied each of their respective interests. However, the Marine Corps, which paid the heaviest price for carrying out Operation Detachment, remained excluded from the decision-making process. When fighter escort operations from Iwo Jima failed, the military sought additional reasons to justify the costly battle. Over the past sixty years historians have perpetuated these illusions ...

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.

America in Color

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