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Munitions of the Mind Posts

The German Nurse Memoirs of the Great War

The German Nurse Memoirs of the Great War

Published December 20, 2024

Written by Jerry Palmer

The majority of the nurse memoirs of the Great War, of all the combatant nations, focus overwhelmingly on their daily work; through this accumulation of detail, they demonstrate their dedication to the well-being of the soldiers, while by the same token their personal lives recede into the background. However, although they play down just how difficult nursing was under these circumstances, perhaps especially for the thousands who were volunteers with no previous medical experience, it is not difficult to work out just how draining it must have been. This is one example of a basic feature of memoirs: because they are inherently selective, what they don’t say is often as instructive as their contents.

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Mosquito: The RAF’s Legendary Wooden Wonder and Its Most Extraordinary Mission

Mosquito: The RAF’s Legendary Wooden Wonder and Its Most Extraordinary Mission

Published October 21, 2024

Reviewed by Tony Pratley.

According to my well-thumbed copy of ‘Popular History for Dummies’, there are a few basic rules to follow. A potential blockbuster must be long enough for the summer holiday and short enough for the beach. Five hundred divided by 50 is a publisher’s basic rule of thumb. Five hundred pages divided into 50 easily digestible chapters. Unremitting action and a host of compelling characters, good but better bad, is also to be encouraged.  As for prose style, a breathless simplicity is best with an occasional authorial nod and a wink.  The reader ought to be left in no doubt about the happy ending.

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Postcards from the Western Front: Pilgrims, Veterans, and Tourists after the Great War

Postcards from the Western Front: Pilgrims, Veterans, and Tourists after the Great War

Published January 22, 2024

Reviewed by Alison Fell

Mark Connelly’s wonderful new book would make a great companion for a tramp across the Western Front battlefields. It draws on an impressive range of primary sources: maps, letters, diaries, novels, press articles, battlefield guides and, of course, postcards, to evoke the landscapes of Northern France and Belgium that had been so devastated by the war. The landscape constitutes the point of connection between past and present, and makes you aware not only of the ghosts of soldiers who tramped the same battlefields, but of the thousands of ‘pilgrims’ – mourners, veterans and tourists – who followed in their footsteps.

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Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead

Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead

Published December 6, 2023

Reviewed by Christopher Kreuzer

Published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan, Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead, is a multi-author collaborative work between two university academics (Fred Cahir and Sara Weuffen) and three other authors (Matt Smith, Peter Bakker and Jo Caminiti). As such, it spans the academic and public history fields, with well-chosen archival photographs, biographical vignettes, and moving personal accounts giving an insight into the gruesome nature and psychological impact of this post-war work.

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From Famine to Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine

From Famine to Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine

Published November 25, 2023

Written by Natalia Kuzovova

The famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine was a genocide of the Ukrainian people that claimed the lives of 3.9 million people. The total number of demographic losses amounted to more than 4.5 million. For a long time, archival documents about the famine were classified. But the surviving Ukrainians kept talking about the fact that ‘we are being killed by hunger’, ‘we were starved to death’. Therefore, the word ‘Holodomor’ became a signifier for this famine.

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The Peoples’ War? The Second World War in Sociopolitical Perspective

The Peoples’ War? The Second World War in Sociopolitical Perspective

Published October 18, 2023

Reviewed by Charlie Hall

It is a good time to be a historian of the Second World War. Amid the upsurge of public interest generated by the 75th and 80th anniversaries of that conflict, scholars have seemingly endless opportunities to engage with the period. Even just within Britain, and just within the last few years, there has been the launch of entirely new Second World War and Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum, a range of dedicated conferences and events (most notably ‘From the Personal to the Global: Lived Experiences of the Second World War’ at the University of Edinburgh), and a whole host of new publications.

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Entrenched

Entrenched

Published September 18, 2023

Written by Andrew McCarthy

“‘You’re in a tight corner, Richard Hannay’, I said to myself. I was crouching behind the Chesterfield in the drawing room. Von Schwabing’s men kept up a steady fire. Bullets had shattered the French windows, and the curtains billowed in the breeze. I knew that Sandy and his men were on the other side of the garden wall. If I could cut across the lawn and reach the wall, I might have a chance. I buttoned my Aquascutum, and made sure that my pistol was secure on its lanyard. I stepped through the shattered windows, and took aim at a rifleman kneeling beside a tree. A pistol bullet bored through my hat. I fired. The rifleman slumped to the ground. This was going to be a first-class show.”

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“New Woman,” Old Stereotypes: A Comparative Study of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany’s “New Woman” in Visual Culture

“New Woman,” Old Stereotypes: A Comparative Study of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany’s “New Woman” in Visual Culture

Published May 9, 2023

Written by Alisha Reid

If I asked you to picture the 1920s “New Woman”, the image that would come to your mind would most likely be based on what you have seen in films and TV shows – both old and modern – of a sexually and financially liberated woman with her short hair and vampy makeup, her boyish-figure draped in a flapper dress. This caricature is not incorrect but it is exactly that: a caricature. This style of woman is almost synonymous with Weimar German culture following the First World War. It is this “New Woman” that people remember seeing in the numerous films that German studios produced over the period. However, what people often fail to remember are the negative narratives surrounding the “New Woman” in Weimar films and the emphasis placed on abandoning this stereotype.

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Red Cross Rose: An Aussie Civilian in France, 1916-1920

Red Cross Rose: An Aussie Civilian in France, 1916-1920

Published March 15, 2023

Reviewed by Emma Hanna

In recent years, the wartime service of civilians near the battlefields of the Great War has been highlighted by histories of the organisations with whom they worked. Historians such as Geoffrey Reznick and Michael Snape have worked to explain how and why voluntary-aid organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) sought to care for servicemen’s well-being wherever they were fighting. The service of hundreds of men and women who worked along the lines of communication, in camps, ports, hospitals and by prisoner of war camps, should be more visible in the war’s histories. These workers fulfilled the roles which military authorities were unable or unwilling to do. They were proud to have shared similar dangers and deprivations to those bearing arms, although they were not permitted to wear any uniform or identifying insignia until late 1917.

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Fighting under Foreign Flags: Transnational Soldiering in the Early-19th Century

Fighting under Foreign Flags: Transnational Soldiering in the Early-19th Century

Published March 13, 2023

Written by Mario Draper

When considering which primary source to select for this blog post, I kept on coming back to the significance of a letter written by a Polish officer Armand von Brochowski to King Leopold I of Belgium on 24 November 1846. In it he explained why he, and dozens of other Polish officers, had made the perilous journey across Europe in the early 1830s to join the Belgian Army.

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