Browse

Thousands of wounded servicemen returned to Japan following the escalation of Japanese military aggression in China in July 1937. Tens of thousands would return home after Japan widened its war effort in 1939. This book relates the experiences of Japanese wounded soldiers and disabled veterans of Japan's “long” Second World War (from 1937 to 1945). It maps the terrain of Japanese military medicine and social welfare practices and establishes the similarities and differences that existed between Japanese and Western physical, occupational, and spiritual rehabilitation programs for war-wounded servicemen, notably amputees. To exemplify the experience of these wounded soldiers, the book draws on the memoir of a Japanese soldier who describes in gripping detail his medical evacuation from a casualty clearing station on the front lines and his medical convalescence at a military hospital. Moving from the hospital to the home front, the book documents the prominent roles adopted by disabled veterans in mobilization campaigns designed to rally popular support for the war effort. Following Japan's defeat in August 1945, U.S. Occupation forces dismantled the social welfare services designed specifically for disabled military personnel, which brought profound consequences for veterans and their dependents. The book gives us a uniquely Japanese version of the all-too-familiar story of soldiers who return home to find their lives (and bodies) remade by combat.

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for blindly following orders, and their enemies in the Pacific War derided them as “cattle to the slaughter.” But, in fact, the Imperial Japanese Army had a long history as one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d'états, violent insurrections, and political assassinations; their associates defied orders given by both the government and the general staff, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders despite direct orders to the contrary. This book explains the culture of rebellion in the Japanese armed forces. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China across the 1930s—a culture of rebellion that made the Pacific War possible. This book argues that brazen defiance, rather than blind obedience, was the motive force of modern Japanese history. The book follows a series of dramatic events: assassinations in the dark corners of Tokyo, the famous rebellion of Saigō Takamori, the “accidental” invasion of Taiwan, the Japanese ambassador's plot to murder the queen of Korea, and the military–political crisis in which the Japanese prime minister “changed colors.” Finally, through the sinister plots of the clandestine Cherry Blossom Society, we follow the deterioration of Japan into chaos, fascism, and world war.

General Douglas MacArthur's storied career is inextricably linked to Asia. His father, Arthur, served as Military Governor of the Philippines while Douglas was a student at West Point, and the younger MacArthur would serve several tours of duty in that country over the next four decades, becoming friends with several influential Filipinos, including the country's future president, Emanuel L. Quezon. In 1935, he became Quezon's military advisor, a post he held after retiring from the U.S. Army and at the time of Japan's invasion of 1941. As Supreme Commander for the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur led American forces throughout the Pacific War. He officially accepted Japan's surrender in 1945 and later oversaw the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. He then led the UN Command in the Korean War from 1950 to 1951, until he was dismissed from his post by President Truman. This book offers a new perspective on the American icon, focusing on his experiences in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea and highlighting the importance of the general's staff to both MacArthur's and the region's history. MacArthur implemented far-reaching democratic reforms under the Occupation. Translated into English for the first time, this book uses a wide range of sources—American and Japanese, official records and oral histories—to present a complex view of MacArthur, one that illuminates his military decisions during the Pacific campaign and his administration of the Japanese Occupation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany emerged as the two most rapidly developing industrial nation-states of the Atlantic world. The elites and intelligentsias of both countries staked out claims to dominance in the twentieth century. This book explores the far-reaching ambitions of naval officers before World War I as they advanced navalism, a particular brand of modern militarism that stressed the paramount importance of sea power as a historical determinant. Aspiring to make their own countries into self-reliant world powers in an age of global empire and commerce, officers viewed the causes of the industrial nation, global influence, elite rule, and naval power as inseparable. Characterized by both transnational exchanges and national competition, the new maritime militarism was technocratic in its impulses; its makers cast themselves as members of a professional elite that served the nation with its expert knowledge of maritime and global affairs. American and German navalist projects differed less in their principal features than in their eventual trajectories. Over time, the pursuits of these projects channeled the two naval elites in different directions as they developed contrasting outlooks on their bids for world power and maritime force. This book challenges traditional, exceptionalist assumptions about militarism and national identity in Germany and the United States in its exploration of empire and geopolitics, warfare and military-operational imaginations, state formation and national governance, and expertise and professionalism.

The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon, tells a new story of enlightenment happening in what seems the least likely of spaces: those of war, martial culture, and the French armed forces on the continent and in the colonies. Based on extensive archival research on military sources in combination with analyses of canonical texts by Rousseau, Voltaire, Guibert and others, The Military Enlightenment shows how French monarchs, royal mistresses, government ministers, military officers, and medical personnel participated in advancing ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, war trauma, and social justice in terms of race, class, and gender. The book constitutes an essential and missing link in scholarship on the long eighteenth century since the military was one of the few institutions of the Old Regime to transform progressive theories into practice. The book elucidates the genesis and unfolding of the Military Enlightenment in terms of people, places, and processes in France, the French Atlantic, and French India. Analyses examine discourses through which military thinkers apprehended and realized the Military Enlightenment from Louis XIV to Napoleon through to modern times: l’esprit philosophique, sociability, sensibility and humanity, and a militaristic and socially democratized patriotic and heroic imaginary.

This book explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's “forgotten war” of 1914–1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, the book guides readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw's wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies. The book shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish–Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women's public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. The book presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. This book illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word.

Second World War tourism in France includes two main components: tourism by the Germans and French during the war and memory tourism to war sites thereafter. Contrary to what is often assumed, tourism in France did not stop with the war. Thousands of German military personnel were given tours in occupied France and French civilians continued to take vacations as well. Many turned out with tourist gazes to watch General de Gaulle march down the Champs-Élysées at the time of the Liberation and sites frequently acquired new significance as in Normandy where Arromanches changed from a spa village to a war tourist destination. Based on French and German archival materials, memoirs, films, the press, and personal interviews, this book addresses the conflicts and competition between the 19th and early 20th century French tourism narratives and the German-dominated tourism version of the Second World War that replaced it, followed by the Gaullist/Resistance accounts after 1944. Although the Germans hardly treated the French kindly during the war, France was not relegated to the position of occupied Poland. Paris was spared the fate of Warsaw during the war. Postwar memory tourists brought home memories of Normandy and other sites that informed their own understandings of war. Narratives changed but war tourism remains a significant contributor to the French economy.