World War II Archives - Page 3 of 5

Kalashnikov’s Lawn Mower: The Man behind the Most Feared Gun in the World

by Stephen Panico

It is a curious device. Standing on a pedestal surrounded by a crude plaster diorama of a workshop is a medley of parts fashioned into a strange upright apparatus. There is a small collection of wooden poles and netting at the back, connected to a base of long spindled metal that seems it would collapse with even the most rudimentary use. This, in turn is welded to a cylindrical front piece that appears to have rake tines jutting forth from it. The entire contraption is connected to a set of wheels that look borrowed from a child’s bicycle. Indeed, it looks like a child’s idea of a lawn mower, improved in ways that altered its appearance but with dubious affect on its function. This device, according to the placard that accompanies it in the museum near Izhevsk, Russia, is a lawn mower. Surrounding it are hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles. The museum is devoted to the inventor of both, Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died on December 23, 2013 at age 94. The primary feature of the museum is most certainly the myriad variations of Kalashnikov’s rifle. Wood and stamped steel along with individual placards describe how this or that minor feature offered diversity to a weapon that, in the modern world, is just about the most diverse around. There are of course many images of Kalashnikov himself. Holding the weapon. Personally presenting variants to front-line soldiers and guards who have performed admirably. Wearing full general regalia and beaming. The juxtaposition of this man, the expert weaponsmith, alongside some of his dramatically lesser known inventions is stark. The man who built the rifle that has been used to take more human lives than any other in history was a tinkerer who liked to improve things, even if it made them appear rough or rudimentary to an outside observer.

Mikhail Kalashnikov as a young man

Basic research into the origins of the design of the Kalashnikov rifle yields a popular story, oft-retold in Russian press releases when describing the most well-known name in military small arms worldwide. Young Mikhail, facing the Germans as a tank commander in WWII, caught shrapnel to his head in a one-sided battle with the Wehrmacht. When he woke up in the hospital he questioned why, when he and his comrades were competing for the use of one tired Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifle, his German foes were each armed with automatic weapons? His mind immediately began to work out a way to arm the Red Army with a weapon that would serve as a force-multiplier, making it much more difficult for a foreign body to invade with the ease of the initial Nazi blitzkrieg.

He built his weapon relatively quickly, but it was tested in the sour battles of the Cold War Era rather than in the crucible of the Second World War. Mikhail was still pleased. His weapon, he felt, would be a deterrent that would allow the Soviet Union to protect its basic infantrymen, allowing them to be the best armed fighting force in the world. The proxy battles of the Cold War would eliminate this dream in short order. Though there was initial reluctance to share the design, Soviet satellite states and, shortly thereafter, Communist allies were all armed with the AK-47. More importantly, they were armed with the ability to mass-produce the weapon, often funded directly by the USSR and supplied with the factory materials necessary for initial production. As those relationships also began to break down, Kalashnikov had to watch as his rifle, designed as a means of shielding Russian soldiers from harm, was used against them time and again.

A Colombian police officer guards Chinese-made AK-47 replicas seized on Nov. 18, 2009 (Image courtesy of NPR)

This was not the only way in which Kalashnikov’s beloved motherland slighted the inventor of its primary weapons platform. Though Kalashnikov designed and built the AK-47 largely on his own he never held any rights to the weapon. This was not a particularly large issue at the time of invention as he was given a relatively generous stipend and housing near his arms factory. As time went on, and particularly with the dissolution of the USSR, such support became much less substantial. Kalashnikov was able to weather this as well, though not without some feelings of resentment. The situation came to a head when the Yeltsin government, in a token show of praise, sent Kalashnikov a rusted pistol as a means of recognition. It was a slight that would color his view of the new Russian Federation for the rest of his life, as a regime that spawned little but economic corruption and hooliganism among Russia’s youth.

In 2003, Kalashnikov partnered with a British firm to lend his name to a collection of “manly” products ranging from umbrellas to pen knives. Of course, there was also a Kalashnikov vodka. It bore both his name and his image, and advertisements featured the proud general in full military regalia encouraging the buzz-seeking masses to drink up. These marketing contracts supplemented his stipend enough to allow him to continue living out the rest of his days in his modest housing near Izhevsk.

Kalashnikov posing with his invention, the AK-47 (Image courtesy of Recoil)

In his latter years Kalashnikov still very much liked to tinker, and to reflect on his most popular invention. Though he denied any responsibility for what he described as the misuse of his weapon, he did come to express some regret for what it had become: a symbol and weapon of choice for terrorists and revolutionary groups the world over. In a popular interview with The Guardian, Kalashnikov stated, “I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work – for example a lawnmower.” His death deprived the world of the production of the Kalashnikov lawn mower. The inventor with an equal passion for his homeland and for mechanical tinkering will be forever inextricably linked with the rifle that bears his name.

Photo Credits:

Mikhail Kalashnikov as a young man (Image courtesy of Recoil)

A Colombian police officer guards Chinese-made AK-47 replicas seized on Nov. 18, 2009 (Image courtesy of NPR)

Kalashnikov posing with his invention, the AK-47 (Image courtesy of Recoil)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Stephen Panico is a December 2011 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a degree Plan II Honors and History. He is currently Marketing Specialist at Austin tech company Apptive and plans to pursue his MBA in the near future.

Further Reading:

Mikhail Kalashnikov obituary

Kalashnikov lends name to “manly” products

Tour of the Kalashnikov Museum

Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon

At 2,700,000 square miles, the Amazon Basin is three-quarters the size of the continental United States, and a million square miles larger than all of Europe exclusive of Russia. Covering two-fifths of South America and three-fifths of Brazil, the Amazon Basin contains one-fifth of available fresh water in the world, one-third of evergreen broad-leaved forest resources, and one-tenth of the world’s living species. The Amazon river, the longest in the world (at 4,255 miles), has some 1,100 tributaries, seven of which are over 1,000 miles long.

And the Amazon’s forests, along with the adjacent Orinoco and Guyanas, represent over half the world’s surviving tropical rain forests. While contemporary accounts of the Amazon often begin by rattling off such statistics to provide readers with seemingly definitive answers, I raise them to make a fundamental point about the region. The Amazon is often imagined as a pristine, and increasingly endangered, realm of nature, but it should be seen as a region that has been constructed by public policies, social mediators, and cultural representations that operate at multiple scales: local, national, and global.

During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory. The Vargas regime subsidized labor migration and agricultural colonization, modernized river transportation, and rationalized rubber production in The Amazon. These fledgling efforts were given an unexpected boost when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently invaded the Malayan peninsula and Dutch East Indies, which deprived the United States of more than 92 percent of its rubber supply.

Unlike other types of tropical flora, rubber was indispensable for modern warfare, ensuring the mobility, speed, and efficiency critical for military defense. The United States, which consumed more rubber than the rest of the world combined in 1940, was dependent on Southeast Asian rubber sources, having failed to develop a synthetic rubber industry, or diversify its sources of natural rubber, or stockpile in preparation for emergencies. In 1942, Brazil agreed to sell its surplus rubber to the United States for a fixed rate for five years. The United States, in turn, invested millions of dollars in health and sanitation programs, public finance, and the relocation of tens of thousands of migrant workers from Northeastern Brazil to tap rubber in the Amazon.

In the context of binational wartime mobilization, a host of new (or renewed) claimants on Amazonian resources and populations emerged. Agronomists, sanitarians, physicians, botanists, engineers, technicians, army officials, intellectuals, consumers, migrant workers, and the media all became involved in Amazonian development. As Earl Parker Hanson noted in 1944: “It is probable that the past two years have seen more actual exploration of the basin, more knowledge gained about its physical nature than have all the four centuries since that early conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, was the first white commander to traverse it.”

Despite wartime pronouncements exhorting the peoples of Brazil and the United States to join in battle against the Axis and the forest, the Amazon’s vast territory, varied natural resources, and charged ideological significance precluded any uniform ideas or policies. National interests and cultural biases often divided people despite shared professional backgrounds or technocratic mindsets that might have united select Brazilian and U.S. policy makers in their efforts to develop the Amazon. Headiness marked an economic boom, but rubber tappers and their bosses jousted over revenues and resources, while migrants pursued varied livelihoods in the region.

Today the landscape of the Amazon reflects the legacy of such wartime tensions and transformations. The creation of Brazilian banking and public health institutions, alongside the expansion of airfields and transportation infrastructure, heralded the postwar advance of capital markets and state consolidation in the region. Mass wartime migration from Northeastern Brazil contributed to the region’s rapid demographic growth and urban expansion. Forest populations’ maintenance of traditional patterns of extraction, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and fishing preserved tropical ecosystems and systems of local knowledge. And the U.S. development of a domestic synthetic rubber industry by 1944-45 redirected postwar foreign investment in the Amazon from the wild rubber trade to mineral extraction. The history of wartime Amazonia also illustrates the shifting appropriation of the region’s resources. The Amazon’s reincarnation as ecological sanctuary resulted not only from postwar deforestation, but the rise of a global environmental movement, the emergence of new fields of scientific inquiry, and the grass roots mobilization of forest dwellers.

By melding the concerns and approaches of environmental, diplomatic, labor, economic, and social history, we can see Amazonian landscapes and lifestyles as the products of ecological, material, and political forces that a competing set of social mediators brought to bear on the meanings and uses of nature. This little known chapter of World War II history illuminates the ways outsiders’ very understandings and representations of the nature of the Amazon have evolved over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region.

“For a Gunner”: A World War II Love Story

by Jacqueline Jones

They met on the boardwalk of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Labor Day of 1941, introduced by mutual friends. She was a self-described ambitious career girl; an English-major graduate of the University of Delaware, she would spend the war years working first in the advertising department of the DuPont Company, and then as the editor of RCA Victor’s company newsletter. He was a mail clerk for DuPont when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in December of 1941 and began a three-month stint of basic training. Following through on what was apparently a classic case of love at first sight, for four and a half years they carried on a passionate correspondence, seeing each other only during his infrequent furloughs. On one of his last furloughs (in 1944) he proposed, and told her that he wanted to get married within two weeks of coming home, whenever the time came. She said yes.

Sylvia Phelps and Albert Jones were born only a few weeks apart, in 1919, and they grew up only a few miles from each other—she in the tiny crossroads of Christiana, Delaware, and he a dozen miles away in Wilmington, the state’s largest city. Perhaps they learned of those connections during their first conversation on the boardwalk. Over time though they would realize that they came from different worlds. She was the somewhat spoiled youngest child of eight, born to sturdy native New Englanders transplanted to Delaware. Her father first worked as a surveyor for coal mining operators and railroad companies. Of necessity the family led a peripatetic existence; the birthplaces of the children chronicled his responsibilities from the Alleghenies to the Blue Ridge Mountains, with the kids born in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. When he settled his family for good in Christiana (in 1924), he prospered from his own sand and gravel business; most of the profits went into paying the college tuition of the children. Sylvia’s parents, finding no Congregational Church in the vicinity of Christiana (or anywhere in Delaware, for that matter), instead joined and became strong supporters of the local Presbyterian Church. The congregation had been founded in 1732, part of the First Great Awakening, and in the twentieth century was still propagating a stern Calvinism based on the doctrines of predestination and original sin.

Albert was the younger son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his wife and two children during the Great Depression. His mother was the daughter of a prominent Wilmington businessman. Although her family’s fortunes declined precipitously in the late nineteenth century, in 1908 her widowed mother managed to send her on an extended grand tour of Europe. Because of a sheltered upbringing, the young woman was not prepared to support the family when her husband left her a “grass widow” in the 1930s. Both Albert and his brother learned to fend for themselves and pick up odd jobs here or there to help support their mother. Moving from one small apartment to another, surrounded by the beautiful dark mahogany furniture their mother had inherited, they lived an irreligious life of genteel poverty. After graduating from high school, Albert started work in a mailroom in a DuPont office building in Wilmington; on his lunch hour and weekends he took flying lessons at the tiny Ballanca airport in nearby New Castle and earned his civilian pilot’s license.

After a variety of wartime assignments that took him to Tennessee, Mississippi, Colorado, North Dakota, and California, he finally arrived at his final destination in the fall of 1944—Twentieth Air Force, 498 Bomber Group, based on the South Pacific island of Saipan. He was a technical sergeant on a B-29 (the so-called “Superfortress”) and served as Central Fire Control (“Top Gun”) on the top of the plane. Through an intercom he radioed the tail gunners below and directed their machine-gun fire to oncoming targets in the air. In the summer of 1945, he and the other crew members successfully completed their quota of thirty bombing missions, mostly raids over Japanese cities.

A published history of the Twentieth Air Force supplied the numbers that represented so much death and destruction inflicted on Japan those last months of the war—65 principal cities obliterated or severely damaged; 602 major war factories destroyed; 1,250,000 tons of shipping sunk by aerial mines; 83 percent of oil refinery production and 75 percent of aircraft engine production destroyed; more than 2 million homes leveled; 330,000 men, women, and children killed and another half million wounded; 8,500,000 people rendered homeless and 21,000,000 displaced.

Albert, my father, was wounded, though not seriously, on one of his missions. Other facts and figures are obscure: How many planes he saw explode and spiral downwards, out of the sky; how many comrades he lost; how many nightmares he endured; how many times he longed for my mother and home. For her part, my mother Sylvia tried to keep busy with work, but could not tamp down the constant anxiety she felt. A devout Presbyterian, she went over in her mind the questions that religion could not seem to answer: Why would an all-powerful deity make this sensitive young man whom she loved so much the instrument of so much pain? How could he, a good person, live with the fact that he had his comrades had killed so many people—so many innocent civilians—whom they had never known or seen? Not until after her death (in 2008) did my brothers and I discover a poem she had written sometime in the summer of 1945, trying to reconcile her faith in an omnipotent God with her fears for my father’s safety—and perhaps for his soul.

For a Gunner

Lord, Thy Glory fills the Heaven—
Will he ever find you there,
In his plan on war-bent mission
Speeding death bombs through the air?

What have You to do with bombers,
Lord, the God of peace and love?
Will you speed him on his journey?
Guide, protect him from above?

Lord, he doesn’t like the killing;
His was not the choice to fight…
It’s so hard to feel Your mercy
In the tense blackout of night.

Lord, Thy Glory fills the Heaven—
Let him glimpse You there on high;
Calm his fear and hate and turmoil
In the vast peace of Your sky.

My father was mustered out of the service on September 1, 1945, and my parents married two weeks later, on September 15. Theirs was a happy and an enduring marriage, severed only by the death of my father a few months shy of their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995.

Photo Credits:

Photographs of Sylvia Phelps and Albert Jones, the author’s parents

The Hadamar Trial: Inadequacies of Postwar Justice

By Madeline Schlesinger

Download “The Hadamar Trial”

The UT history department has announced that Madeline Schlesinger is the winner of this year’s Claudio Segre Prize, which recognizes each year’s best History Honors Thesis. For her award-winning project, Madeline researched the infamous Hadamar Institution, a German hospital in which Nazi officials undertook a mass sterilization and euthanasia program against “undesirable” elements of society. Madeline’s project specifically focuses on the legal proceedings that took place after Allied Forces discovered the facility and placed its personnel on trial for crimes against humanity. You can read her project’s abstract below or download the entire paper in the link above.

Abstract:

Throughout the Second World War, the Third Reich used facilities at the Hadamar institution to carry out the Nazi euthanasia program—an operation that targeted German citizens suffering from mental illness and physical disabilities. Just months after Allied victory and the American liberation of Hadamar, a United States Military Commission led by the young Leon Jaworski tried personnel from Hadamar for violation of international law in the murder of 476 Soviet and Polish forced laborers. The Hadamar War Crimes Case, formally known as United States of America v. Alfons Klein et al., commenced in early October of 1945 and figured as the first postwar mass atrocity trial prosecuted in the American-occupied zone of Germany.

Smoke rising from the crematoria at Hadamar, probably 1941 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Hadamar Institute personnel socializing, sometime between 1940 and 1942 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Although often overlooked in the shadow of the subsequent events at Nuremberg, the Hadamar Trial set precedent for war crimes trials and the rewriting of international law to include the charge of crimes against humanity. In its historical context, the Hadamar trial tells a story much larger than the conviction of seven German citizens. It tells the story of the Third Reich’s murderous euthanasia program, one of the United States’ first confrontations with the crimes of the Holocaust, the inadequacies of international law in the immediate postwar period, the impossibility of true retribution in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, and the slow erosion of justice in the years following the war.

Three inmates of the Hadamar Institute soon after the U.S. military discovered the facility, April 5, 1945 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Irmgard Huber, chief nurse at Hadamar Institute, after American soldiers liberated the facility (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

My thesis aims to accurately depict the crimes committed at Hadamar, present the collision of German and international law during the proceedings, and prove the inadequacy of contemporary legal infrastructure to prosecute the crimes against humanity committed during World War II.

Pinching and Swiping, or How I Won the Digital War

Battle of the Bulge
Shenandoah Studio
iPad, version 1.0.3

I have been refighting the Second World War my entire life. My campaign began with the board game Axis and Allies and continued on the computer with Panzer General and Close Combat. I spent hours as a teenager designing scenarios for the war in Civilization II, with a computer mouse in one hand and my history textbook in the other. I particularly enjoyed creating scenarios in which the player had to run an airlift over enemy territory in order to resupply a beleaguered city – allowing me to relive my grandfather’s stories about flying over the hump. Perhaps this pastime reeks of warmongering, but I’ve always looked at it as glorified puzzle solving with a dash of history. I didn’t know it at the time, but these gaming experiences represented my first foray into historical research: I checked out books from the public library on particular campaigns so that I could provide the proper context and I studied my father’s world atlas to make sure I had the topography correct. I didn’t just want to have fun. I also wanted to get it right.

Shenandoah Studio is also interested in getting it right and having fun at the same time. Their game, Battle of the Bulge, is a strategic simulation of Germany’s surprise counteroffensive in 1944, which was called the “Battle of the Bulge” because of the bulge the campaign created in maps of the frontline at the time.

The battle represented Germany’s last attempt to salvage the war before their country was completely encircled. The second half of 1944 found German troops in steady retreat as American and British forces broke out from the Normandy beaches, while the Soviet army completed successful campaigns into the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania. The German high command, however, had yet to give up hope. They believed that a settled peace with America and Britain could still be achieved with one decisive victory on the Western Front. While Allied forces rested for a new campaign in spring 1945, the German army quietly collected troops and supplies for a surprise attack.

Screenshot of gameplay (Image courtesy of the author)

The plan for the German offensive was twofold. First, the German high command hoped to capture the Belgium city of Antwerp – a major supply port that the Allies intended to use during the invasion of Germany. The Allied army possessed a significant advantage in men and material by the winter of 1944, but they still relied on resupply from ports in western France. This left their supply lines dangerously long and vulnerable to attack. Second, in the process of taking Antwerp, Germany hoped to drive a wedge between American and British forces on the Western Front. The path of the offensive would take German forces through the Ardennes Forest, which lay roughly at the point where American and British forces met on the other side of the lines. German generals believed they could encircle one or both of these forces during the offensive, a move that would encourage division between Allied leaders and lead to a peace settlement.

The Battle of the Bulge allows the player to relive the German counteroffensive from the perspective of either the Allies or the Axis, and through either a short or long scenario. The short scenario, “Race to the Meuse,” includes the first three days of the battle and can be completed in about half an hour. The long scenario, “Battle of the Bulge,” follows the first week or so of the campaign and can take up to two or three hours. In the game, the player takes command of division size units (e.g. the 101st Airborne, the 116th Panzer division, etc.), and determines their movement around the battlefield. The game is broken into days that last from 6 am to 6 pm. Within each day, players are given a random number of turns that are determined by behind-the-scenes dice rolls.

Screenshots of gameplay (Images courtesy of the author)

The game board may look imposing, but the gameplay is easily accessible to anyone who has played a game of Risk. Combat is determined by under-the-hood dice rolls, which allow players to barrel into the game without having to learn a complicated set of rules. The iPad is particularly suited to this style of game because it gives players a bit of the tactile feel of playing an actual board game without having to clear a coffee table or clean up after aggressive dice rollers.

Generally, the goal of the Axis player is to drive their forces as quickly as possible to the Meuse River, and then protect their advances from attack by Allied reinforcements. The Allied player’s goal is to play a spoiling role by delaying, or, if possible, halting the Axis advance before they are able to achieve victory. While the game allows the players to make their own decisions regarding the movement of units, these decisions are couched in the historical realities of the actual campaign. These realities can either help or hinder the player’s cause. For instance, the game begins with the Axis surprise attack on December 16, 1944, but on the morning of the attack Axis armor was delayed by a traffic jam. This means that Axis players in Battle of the Bulge cannot use tank units in their first three turns. Additionally, as the campaign enters its later stages, Axis players must contend with gas shortages that limit the movement of their armor. Axis players are helped, however, by the presence of commandos behind enemy lines (Otto Skorzeny’s famous English-speaking German soldiers), which they can use to delay the movement of Allied units. On the Allied side, players are helped by extra reinforcements and air support, but like their historical counterparts they must wait several days for new forces to arrive and for the skies to clear.

Screenshot of gameplay (Image courtesy of Shenandoah Studios)

The presence of these accurate limitations means that players must pay attention to the game’s historical narrative, which is delivered through a “Daily Briefing” before each day. These briefings include information regarding reinforcements and supplies as well as a short history about the real life events for that particular day. The short histories provide players with an opportunity not only to learn about the actual event, but also to compare their strategy with the strategies pursued by generals on both sides of the conflict. In my multiple play throughs of the short and long campaign, I learned that one of the keys to victory is keeping a close watch on the in-game calendar, which provides a shorthand description of the details listed in the “Daily Briefing.” This information is particularly useful for Allied players, as they can use the schedule of reinforcements and resupply to plan out the path of their retreat and determine the timing of their counterattack. Thus, the history in Battle of the Bulge is not merely window dressing. It can mean the difference between victory and defeat, and the players who ignore it do so at their own peril – or at least the peril of their digital army.

Screenshot of gameplay (Image courtesy of Shenandoah Studios)

One might say that this level of attachment to the historical narrative would predetermine the outcome of most matches, but in fact this potential problem is mitigated by two variables: the decision making of individual players and the game’s turn mechanic. The game offers two levels of artificial intelligence for single players to face off against, and these computer opponents can put up quite a fight. I never felt that I played against the same strategy twice. In addition, players can face off against friends in “face to face” matches (what old fogeys like me call “hot seat” matches) where they pass the iPad back and forth, or challenge each other online through Apple’s Game Center. The turn mechanic adds an extra layer of variability because players are not guaranteed a certain number of turns each day. This feature adds to the excitement, particularly near the end of each day, when players are not exactly sure how many turns they have left. This leads to a bit of brinksmanship, where opponents attempt to delay their final moves so that their enemy will not be able to respond.

Screenshot of gameplay (Image courtesy of Shenandoah Studios)

Only a few minor flaws hold up an otherwise stellar production. The game’s historical narratives, particularly the background history available in the main menu, contain several typos that include mistakes with punctuation and between singular and plural pronouns. The teacher in me also wanted to see a short, recommended reading section or bibliography for players who wanted to learn more. On the point of replay value, the game does not yet include additional scenarios, or the means to easily modify the game’s preconditions and rules. The addition of this sort of feature may be too much to ask for a small studio like Shenandoah, but it should be considered for their upcoming game on El Alamein.

In conclusion, Battle of the Bulge is a game that matches a challenging tactical simulation with an excellent historical narrative. This sort of package would be considered a bargain on a console or computer for $30 or more. The fact that the game is available on a tablet, and for a scant $10, adds a great deal to Shenandoah Studio’s achievement. It is perhaps the only mobile game that I would forgive students for playing in class.

You may also like:

“You Have Died of Dysentary,” Robert Whitaker’s look at American history in video games

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Ostuka (2003) & The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Ostuka (2012)

by David A. Conrad

Writers of ethnically-themed novels are often pegged as simply recording their family stories. However, by the time National Book Award finalist Julie Otsuka set out to capture her mother’s stories of “camp,” dementia had already stolen her once-clear memories. For the novel that became When the Emperor was Divine, Otsuka had to research the events that took her, as a 10-year-old along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, from their homes on the west coast designated them as “enemy aliens,” and confined them to internment camps in inland desert areas during World War II. Her research produced the moving and telling details that reveal the profound loss of fought-for home and identity, the crushing helplessness, and resulting mental incapacity, that beset Japanese Americans with the onset of the war. Her novel conveys how they were literally stripped of all but what they could carry, and forced them to wait for the end of the war imprisoned in temporary barracks behind barbed wire removed from the stabilizing routines of work, school, home, community, and greater acceptance. Inspired by Hemingway, Otsuka uses luminous prose to convey the unmooring of one Japanese American family though everyday objects: the family dog that had to be killed because it could not be brought or adopted, a jump rope cut into pieces, stones thrown through train windows, silverware buried in the garden. A painter by training, Otsuka states that When the Emperor was Divine first came to her in images, which she then set down in words (Texas Book Festival, Oct. 27, 2012).

In contrast, Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, for which she won the PEN/Faulkner Award, flowed as a multitude of “chanting” voices. Based upon two years of research into the lives of Japanese picture brides—young Japanese women of Otsuka’s grandmother’s generation, who followed arranged marriages and came to America between 1908 and 1924 only to find that neither their husbands nor their circumstances matched their advertised claims. Otsuka uses a “we” voice with no single protagonist to evoke the range of struggles and adaptions women made when they entered hard, working-class lives alongside their husbands on farms, in stores and restaurants, boarding houses, mining and lumbering towns, raising children and keeping house, sometimes in tents or newly built shacks without electricity or running water. There are few documents recorded in these women’s own voices and Otsuka recreates their world through their eyes. It is not a glorious story of immigrant integration and success, but a richly layered and compelling account of struggle and survival that honors the picture brides’ humanity while underscoring that their ranks did not produce any recognized heroes or literary tropes.

Japanese-Americans boarding a train in Los Angeles bound for an internment camp, April 1942 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Japanese-Americans standing by posters with internment orders (Image courtesy of the United States Department of the Interior)

These two slight novels are well worth the couple of hours that they take to consume. Otsuka uses elegant and compact prose to transport readers to a transient time and set of circumstances that are, thankfully, long over, although the psychic remnants continue to resonate.

You can purchase When the Emperor Was Divine on Amazon here.

You may also like:

David A. Conrad’s reviews of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II and Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village

The Second World War by Antony Beevor (2012)

by Dolph Briscoe IV

Acclaimed British historian Antony Beevor’s recently published The Second World War is a masterful account of the worst conflict in human history, when truly the entire world became engulfed in the flames of war. Having written previously on various aspects of the era, Beevor’s work attempts to synthesize his prior research into a detailed narrative of World War II.

Consisting of over 800 pages, The Second World War is primarily a military and diplomatic history of the war. Beevor provides a brief introduction discussing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and creation of the Nazi totalitarian state in Germany, as well as Japan’s invasion of China, in the 1930s. The book covers the entire course of World War II, beginning with Nazi Germany’s preparations during 1939 for invading Poland and concluding with American use of atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender. Beevor skillfully describes the military strategies employed by both the Allied and the Axis Powers during the war. He focuses on the particular generals from each country, such as Rommel of Nazi Germany, Zhukov and Chuikov of the Soviet Union, Montgomery of Great Britain, and Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton of the United States, contemplating how their individual personalities affected their planning and the course of the war. The author gracefully moves his story from one sphere of the war to another, whether it be Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, China, or the Pacific islands.Hitler attending a Nazi rally (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The leaders of the great powers serve as the major actors in The Second World War. Beevor especially gives much attention to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and fittingly so, as the vicious battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were of central importance in World War II. The author vividly depicts how both dictators possessed excessive vanity and extreme paranoia. Such characteristics contributed to creating brutal totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. Hitler and Stalin bitterly hated each other, and their mutual loathing influenced the course of the war, according to Beevor. Hitler became obsessed with conquering Stalingrad, believing that the loss of his namesake city would humiliate the Soviet leader. This proved disastrous for the German armies. After Hitler’s suicide at the war’s end, Stalin ordered his men to find his corpse and bring it to the Soviet Union as a final punishment for the Nazi leader. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt also receive much attention from the author. Churchill possessed dogged determination to ensure Great Britain’s survival, even in the darkest hours of the war. Roosevelt’s pragmatism and moderation helped keep the Allied Powers focused on winning World War II, especially when Churchill and Stalin clashed on matters of military strategy and postwar Europe. Beevor also examines their often complicated relationship with allies Chiang Kai-shek of China and Charles de Gaulle of France, and illustrates the significance of the Emperor to the Japanese people.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin pose for photographs during the Yalta Conference. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)Representatives from the Allied countries meet in Tehran in December 1943. Standing outside the Russian Embassy, left to right: unidentified British officer, General George C. Marshall, Chief of staff of USA, shaking hands with Sir Archibald Clark Keer, British Ambassador to the USSR, Harry Hopkins, Marshal Stalin’s interpreter, Marshal Josef Stalin, Foreign minister Molotov, General Voroshilov. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Stalingrad ablaze (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The author vividly depicts the unprecedented violence and cruelty of World War II. Soldiers fought to sheer exhaustion in harsh climates. Civilians in China, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany suffered from widespread rape, looting, and murder at the hands of enemy armies. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees and prisoners of war. Starvation affected millions around the world. Bombing raids devastated cities and countryside. Atomic bombs destroyed two Japanese cities and radiation caused lasting health problems for many people in Japan. Stalin’s paranoia led to vicious purges of both real and imagined enemies. And most infamously, Hitler and Nazi Germany conducted genocide against Jews in Europe. Beevor fully describes this horror, discussing concentration camps, sickening medical experiments performed on Jews, and how virulent anti-Semitism and propaganda caused most Germans to ignore these crimes against humanity perpetrated around them. Beevor’s accounts of the brutalities of World War II, especially the Holocaust, reminds readers how hatred can lead to sadism and true evil.

A bombed Hiroshima (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki before the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Aerial view of Nagasaki after the Allied bombing (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Antony Beevor’s The Second World War is a most welcome addition to the vast historiography on World War II. With great skill Beevor narrates the military and diplomatic events of this war while also examining the terrible human suffering of these years. Readers interested in World War II, military history, and international relations will benefit from reading this fine book about the most consequential event of the twentieth century.

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Antony Beever talks to the BBC about conducting research for The Second World War.

“Looking at World War II”: Part I and Part II: our blog pieces on recently released German and Russian photographs taken during the war.

Our monthly feature on the UT Austin History Department’s Normandy Scholar Program.

Our review of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal by Archibald Percival Wavell, ed. Penderel Moon (1973)

Archibald Percival Wavell served as the penultimate viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, meticulously chronicling his experience through the twilight of the British Raj. With only light edits from Penderel Moon, Wavell’s journal delivers a lucid account of declining imperial power and rising nationalist aspirations in India during the Second World War. Wavell’s frustrations multiply through the journal, revealing not only the viceroy’s suspicions of key Indian leaders, but also the growing intractability of continued colonial rule.

The journal confirms Moon’s opening assertion that the structural limitations of the viceroyalty crippled Wavell. His entries reveal his claustrophobic position between the competing factions of Indian nationalism and the British government itself. Indeed, Britain’s War Cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, demonstrates remarkable stubbornness through the 1943-1944 Bengal famine, cynically dismissing the viceroy’s relief proposals. Similarly, the Simla Conference of 1945 crumbles as much from pressures imposed by London as by the recalcitrance of the Congress and the Muslim League. Even after the Labour Party’s victory in the summer of 1945, Wavell reveals the government’s rigidity in its approach to Indian nationalism by exposing its refusal to grant the viceroy greater autonomy in negotiating the transfer of power and excluding him from the inner workings of the 1946 Cabinet Mission. In these ways, Wavell’s writings provide strong evidence for the charge that the British government’s failure to innovate in an administrative capacity precluded a smoother road to Indian independence.

Wavell candidly admits his own limitations as a negotiator, stating flatly: “I do not pretend to be a diplomatist.” Yet his journal reveals a creative and introspective individual, concerned both with the practical politics and the moral ramifications of his imperial role. While highly critical of India’s nationalist leaders, Wavell clearly aspires to deliver on promises of self-government. Evidence pours forth, condemning the inflexibility of that very role and redeeming the individual. Wavell emerges as a complex and contemplative character, in sharp contrast with his contemporary image as unimaginative and out of touch.

Photo credits:

No. 9 Army Film and Document Unit, “Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG GCB DSO 1887-1976. Montgomery as CIGS (Chief of Imperial General Staff) designate in the Vicerehal Gardens, New Delhi with the Viceroy, Field Marshall Wavell and Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Vlaude Auschinleck,” 17 June 1946.

The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor (2009)

by James Hudson

For many historians of China and even for many Chinese, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of China’s Nationalist Party and then founder of the Republic of China in Taiwan, was a classic “bad guy” of history. He was incompetent and ruthless. He cared little for the Chinese people or for those who worked under him. In popular history such interpretations of Chiang abound, but Jay Taylor’s biography casts the General in a different light, crediting Chiang with establishing and strengthening a faltering economy during a period of intense political and social turmoil. Taylor also observes that, while “Chiang could be heartless and sometimes ruthless, but he lacked the pathological megalomania and the absolutist ideology of a totalitarian dictator,” and regarding the potential of his own ideas was “more self-delusional than hypocritical.”

Chiang’s collaboration and subsequent rivalry with the Allied Commander in China during World War II, General Joseph Stilwell, was chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in her famous book, Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45. Although Tuchman portrays Stilwell as one of the most brilliant military minds of his generation, she often paints Chiang as nothing more than an inept tyrant, whom Stilwell affectionately referred to as “peanut.”

But Taylor provides Chiang’s side of the story, noting that the American general bore just as much responsibility for the nationalists’ failure to engage the Japanese and eventually defeat the communists, and that in the end Stilwell’s deep animosity for Chiang “clouded his judgment.” In this regard one also wonders if Taylor reaches too far. For instance, although he accounts for Stilwell’s impulsive character, he does not address the fact that all of the American commanders who worked with Chiang — Joseph Stilwell, Albert Wedemeyer, and even George Marshall, who eventually became Secretary of State—found him difficult to deal with. Some other leaders, such as Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, and commander of the Flying Tigers, Claire Chennault, found Chiang personable and charming. Such appeal was no doubt augmented by the influence of his wife. Educated in the United States and fluent in English, Madame Chiang Kai-shek remained her husband’s constant advocate throughout the war with Japan, representing the Nationalist Party abroad, even becoming the first woman to ever testify before Congress, pressing the continued need for American aid during World War II.

Perception of the seeming luxurious lifestyle of Chiang and his wife both at home and abroad at times strengthened and at times weakened the nationalist cause. But although the comforts enjoyed by Asia’s most influential couple may seem extravagant today, Taylor concludes that “luxury and constant attendance by personal servants, however, do not necessarily ruin prospects for a serious life. [Winston] Churchill all his life was dressed and undressed by someone else.”

For both popular as well as academic audiences, this book stands as a thorough and engaging read of a complex man and his leadership of China in the early twentieth century.

Photo credits:

Roberts, “Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt are shown on the White House lawn February 24, 1943 during the former’s visit to the Capitol,” 24 February 1943

U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs via The Library of Congress

The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (2006)

by Isabel Huacuja

In The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper chronicle the war years of the British Empire in its Asian Crescent, which curved from Calcutta to Singapore into Malaysia and Burma. Soldiers from the British 14th army stationed in India and Burma felt that few in the West took notice of them and sardonically called themselves the “forgotten army.” This label remains pertinent even today as the battles in Europe loom larger in the histories of the WWII than the war against Japan in Southeast Asia.

The “forgotten armies,” however, include much more than Britain’s 14th army. The forgotten armies encompass Subhas Bose’s Indian National Army, which fought for India’s liberation on the Japanese side, the Burma Independence Army of Aung San, and Chin Peng’s communist guerilla army in Malaya. Furthermore, Bayly and Harper’s forgotten armies also include the some 600,000 refugees who fled Burma in 1942 and perished in the mud and “green hell’ passes of Assam, as well as the thousands of laborers who toiled building the Burma – Thailand railway. Finally, this book’s forgotten armies include the Indian coolies, tea states workers, tribal people, ‘comfort women,’ and the nurses and doctors who provided Japanese and British soldiers with much needed labor and assistance. In this book, Bayly and Harper “reassemble and reunite the different, often unfamiliar narratives,” of the Far Eastern War, but the book amounts to much more than a military history of the Japanese invasion of the British Asia. The authors draw a “panoramic picture” of a region ravaged by “warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease and famine,” during the five daunting years from 1941 to 1945. Furthermore in the concluding pages, the authors argue that Japanese occupation hastened nationalist struggles for independence in the region.

Workers with hand tools build the Burma Road in southwest China, 1944

In The Forgotten Armies, Bayly and Harper present an exemplary scholarly work that draws from a large number of memoirs and diaries. But the authors deserve most praise because, in addition to scholarly accuracy and scope, they offer the nuance, enticement, and that feeling, which we can only call human touch, of great fiction. Take, for instance, Bayly and Harper’s description of the plight of refugees who fled from Burma into India: “Women and children collapsed and drowned in the mud […] Porters refused to touch the corpses so they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful on the record. They added to the sense of macabre as they flitted amongst the corpses.” Passages like this one stir a multitude of emotions: from shock, to terror, to anger, to sorrow and, finally, compassion. The authors paint a vivid and memorable picture of Malaysia and Burma under Japanese occupation and of India mobilized for war, and they tell a heart-wrenching and gripping tale of suffering and despair, a tale that the reader will feel both glad and sad to know. Bayly and Harper bring to life the many ‘forgotten armies’ that fought in Southeast Asia during WWII so that we never forget them again.

Photo Credit, US Army Signal Corps, via Wikimedia Commons

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