Military Internees Prisoners Of War And The Irish State During The Second World War

Between 1939 and 1945, over two hundred German and forty-five Allied servicemen were interned in neutral Ireland. They presented a series of extremely complex issues for the de Valera government, which strove to balance Ireland's international relationships with its obligations as a neutral.

Between 1939 and 1945, over two hundred German and forty-five Allied servicemen were interned in neutral Ireland. They presented a series of extremely complex issues for the de Valera government, which strove to balance Ireland's international relationships with its obligations as a neutral.

The story of two RAF fliers interned in Ireland during World War II.

Existing at the intersection of military history, literary criticism, social history and film studies, The Irish Myth of the Second World War challenges the dominant conception of Ireland's actions during the Second World War. While other European neutrals fostered myths of unity and solidarity during the Second World War, Eire constructed a mixed narrative of pride at neutrality combined with an eagerness to claim an Irish contribution to Allied victory. An estimated 70,000 people from Eire joined the British armed forces during the Second World War; their presence allowed the de Valera government to claim that that Irish neutrality had been beneficial to the Allies. Thus the Irish war myth depicts Eire as simultaneously within and outside the war, maintaining neutrality while assisting the Allies to victory. Instead, Bernard Kelly argues that this is a false construction. This book demonstrates how the Irish conception of the war has largely assimilated the main aspects of the British war myth, which has been transmitted into Ireland through British films, television and publications, while also adding specifically Irish dimensions to it. He argues that once the Northern Ireland conflict moved towards a political solution, Irish participation in the Second World War was inevitably held up as an example of British-Irish and North-South cooperation, and in the process the veteran's story of the war has been almost completely adopted by the Irish public. This is an important contribution to the history of the Second World War.

This edited volume is a sequel to, and a development of, The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936-2016 (2016). It focuses on the six major European countries and states that remained officially neutral throughout the Second World War, namely Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican. Its transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary approach addresses complex questions pertaining to collective remembrance, national policies and politics, and intellectual as well as cultural responses to neutrality during and after the conflict. The contributions are from a broad range of scholars working across the disciplines of history, literature, film, media, and cultural studies. Their thought-provoking chapters challenge many assumptions about neutrality in the post-war European and global context, thereby filling a gap in the existing scholarship. Common themes that run through the volume include the intertwined and dynamic links between neutrality and moral responsibility during and after the Second World War, the importance of memory politics and popular culture in shaping collective memories, and the impact of the Holocaust in shifting traditional perspectives on neutrality since the 1990s. This volume will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars interested in the field of memory studies, as well as non-specialist readers.

A pathbreaking account of World War II POW camps, challenging the longstanding belief that the Japanese Empire systematically mistreated Allied prisoners. In only five months, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, the Japanese Empire took prisoner more than 140,000 Allied servicemen and 130,000 civilians from a dozen different countries. From Manchuria to Java, Burma to New Guinea, the Japanese army hastily set up over seven hundred camps to imprison these unfortunates. In the chaos, 40 percent of American POWs did not survive. More Australians died in captivity than were killed in combat. Sarah Kovner offers the first portrait of detention in the Pacific theater that explains why so many suffered. She follows Allied servicemen in Singapore and the Philippines transported to Japan on “hellships” and singled out for hard labor, but also describes the experience of guards and camp commanders, who were completely unprepared for the task. Much of the worst treatment resulted from a lack of planning, poor training, and bureaucratic incoherence rather than an established policy of debasing and tormenting prisoners. The struggle of POWs tended to be greatest where Tokyo exercised the least control, and many were killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes rather than deliberate mistreatment. By going beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, Prisoners of the Empire contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.

This book project traces the thought of several Roman Catholic Modernists (and one especially virulent anti-Modernist) as they confronted the intellectual challenges posed by the Great war from war from 1895 to 1907.