Societies at War

For Britain the Second World War exists in popular memory as a time of heroic sacrifice, survival and ultimate victory over Fascism. In the Irish state the years 1939-1945 are still remembered simply as 'the Emergency'. Eire was one of many small states which in 1939 chose not to stay out of the war but one of the few able to maintain its non-belligerency as a policy.

How much this owed to Britain's military resolve or to the political skills of Éamon de Valera is a key question which this new book will explore. It will also examine the tensions Eire's policy created in its relations with Winston Churchill and with the United States. The author also explores propaganda, censorship and Irish state security and the degree to which it involves secret co-operation with Britain. Disturbing issues are also raised like the IRA's relationship to Nazi Germany and ambivalent Irish attitudes to the Holocaust.

Drawing upon both published and unpublished sources, this book illustrates the war's impact on people on both sides of the border and shows how it failed to resolve sectarian problems in Northern Ireland while raising higher the barriers of misunderstanding between it and the Irish state across its border.

What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. This time was unique for British children - parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future.

Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films and book-related play-activity in relation to value systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective, the development of sophistication, retention and loss of pre-war attitudes and their post-war fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached the USA, and vice versa, and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-rural division, ageism, class, race, and gender awareness are explored.

In this incredibly broad-ranging book, covering over 100 writers, Owen Dudley Edwards looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war as a whole on what children could read during the war and what they made of it, he reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit.

This book examines in depth for the first time the origins, development, and reception of the major dramatic screen representations of ‘The Few’ in the Battle of Britain produced over the past seventy years. It explores both continuity and change of presentation in relation to a wartime event that acquired near-mythical dimensions in popular consciousness even before it happened and has been represented multiple times over the course of the past seven decades. Alongside technical developments, considerable social, cultural, and political fluctuation (as well as an expansion of factual knowledge concerning the battle itself) occurred in this period, all of which helped to shape how the battle came to be framed at particular junctures. The ways in which the Battle of Britain was being represented in other fictional forms as well histories and commemorations form part of the context in which screen representations are explored.

Films discussed in detail include The Lion Has Wings, First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky and Battle of Britain, along with the television productions Piece of Cake and A Perfect Hero. Foreign productions, such as A Yank in the RAF and Dark Blue World, as well as abandoned projects and dramas in which ‘The Few’ feature in a more tangential fashion, are also mentioned in context. The emphasis throughout is on production issues and the extent to which these screen dramas reflected or influenced popular understanding of 1940. The Battle of Britain on Screen is therefore a contribution to the growing scholarly literature on how the Second World War has been remembered and represented within the United Kingdom.

This is the first study of the aims that motivated the major powers - the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany and Japan - to fight in the Second World War. The book shows, in a way that has not previously been attempted, how some war aims were constants that were unlikely to be abandoned except as a result of total defeat while others arose and sometimes declined as a result of the fortunes of war. Fresh light is shed on the wartime transition of the United States and the Soviet Union to superpower status, while the author shows that consistency is most evident in Great Britain, content with the international prewar status quo, and Nazi Germany, intent from the first on destroying it and replacing it with a new order in which all liberal and civilised values would be annihilated.

Based largely on published sources, including published documentary material, the aim is to ensure accessibility for a range of readers. The level at which it is pitched, the synthesis of a broad range of material, its breadth of coverage and the comparative element will make this an ideal text for students studying the Second World War.

Wartime architectural damage is an area which has until now been subject more to a process of mythologization than to historical analysis - for most it means only Coventry, Dresden, and perhaps Bomber Harris. This fascinating new book attempts to counter this trend. Introducing the subject of wartime destruction of architecture and historic monuments, Nicola Lambourne compares the damage inflicted upon Germany, Britain and France and considers the use and abuse of this type of destruction in the lowering of morale and for propaganda purposes.

Commentaries on large-scale destruction have focused more on the resulting human damage than on the effect on the architectural heritage, with the result that the bombardment of historic monuments has almost been taken for granted as an inevitable but essentially unproblematic aspect of 'total war'. However the debate surrounding the morality of this type of damage made it an important and highly visible issue during the Second World War and this book aims to recover the significance and resonance that architectural and cultural damage had at the time.

Highly readable and including much fascinating detail, this book spans the areas of military, social, cultural and architectural history, placing the subject within the overall history of the Second World War in Europe and the longer term perspective of events between the 1870s and 1990s. Illustrated with forty black and white photographs, it will appeal to all those with an interest in the damage inflicted during Second World War.

Key Features

• Topical, in light of damage being inflicted upon the former Yugoslavia
• Comparative approach - across country and subject area - makes this book unique
• Illustrated with 40 stunning black and white photographs
• Evokes the significance of architectural and cultural damage during the Second World War