The Second World War was a conflict that affected the everyday life of millions of people around the globe. The war was truly global, and its impact felt far from the battlefields. Indeed, this was a war that defied and complicated the idea of ‘fronts’, and made the division between battlefields and civilian environments difficult to define. The war targeted civilians who died in far greater numbers than military personnel. As civilians and as combatants, women were very much a part of the war. This collection focuses on some of their experiences.

The women studied in this volume experienced exile from home and occupation by foreign troops. They accompanied armies as auxiliaries and military nurses. They fought alongside male peers, served as missionaries to the interned and the blind, and lived their everyday lives in difficult circumstances. Some women experienced a loss of freedom and individual rights, while others used their voice to lobby politicians to change military policies. Several of the women in this volume found that the war years opened more opportunities for work or marriage, while others were denied the opportunity to continue relationships or employment. Some women lived through the war years, while others did not survive. Many of the chapters in the collection are based on diaries, letters, and memoirs of individuals, on interviews, scrapbooks and photographs. As micro histories, they reveal the way the politics of war are immensely personal, and have an impact on the minutiae of daily life. Thus, as editors, we believe the micro histories in this volume are a useful way to examine some of the diverse experiences of individuals living during a time of total war.

As scholars recognize the significance of documenting and analyzing the entirety of wartime experiences, the literature on women and the Second World War is growing. The first studies tended to focus on women's war work and contributions to the war effort on the home front. Influenced in part by feminism and Joan Scott's seminal article on the usefulness of gender as a category of analysis, these studies emphasized the patriarchal structures that complicated women's lives, and also illustrated the significance of their wartime labour. Recent studies explore women's work in military auxiliary units, as partisans and spies, as military nurses and in reproduction, food production and rationing, and as sex workers.

Few historical events have reverberated as fully in modern European culture as the Second World War. With the passing of the generation that experienced the conflict, direct memory is fading. Nevertheless, the communal remembrance of the War continues to reverberate in twenty-first century European culture. The countless anniversaries, tributes, and other acts of commemoration taking place are attempts to establish a link between a fast-changing contemporary world and a common past. Many European nations have used the war years to re-define themselves in the post-war period. In France, for example, the collective memory of the war revolved for a long time around resistance. This is a collective memory that has been challenged and undermined by questions about collaboration which began to air after 1968. Since the 2000s, French scholars of the war have focused on the German control and occupation of Eastern France including Alsace. This is a unique area because of both the geographical proximity to and the shared history with Germany. While Strasbourg remained a free city, the population spoke German.

In 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War, the German army occupied Alsace. Alsatian, French, and German cultures clashed under the occupation. Approximately three quarters of all Alsatians were Catholic and pro-French, and the Protestant minorities were pro-German. The majority of Alsatians, including some middle-class Protestants, did not wish to be ruled by Germans. Many Alsatian Catholics believed that, on the condition that the French repented for their sins, the Virgin Mary would actively participate in French affairs. Sins in the 1870s, according to these French/Catholics, included revolution, republicanism, absence of fidelity to the Church, and a failure to support the Pope. They believed the Prussian victory over France was the penalty for these sins. According to T. A. Keselman, author of Miracles and Prophesies in Nineteenth-Century France, in October 1872, pilgrims from Metz and Strasbourg carrying Alsatian banners led a procession to Lourdes where they asked the Virgin to return Alsace-Lorraine to France. The following year another group of pilgrims went to Paray-le Monial to the Church of Sacré-Coeur carrying a banner with the caption, ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus, redeem France. Give us back our homeland!’ At that time, most Alsatians were antagonistic to the Germans.

The Second World War in Europe began in 1939, yet war in China began in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria and established Manchukuo (1932–45) under Japanese control. After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, Republican China (1912–49) declared war on Japan. The Guomindang (GMD, Nationalist Party) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the National Front, and the war quickly spread. Canton (present day Guangzhou), a key regional metropolitan center in the Pearl River Delta, was targeted by Japanese forces who wanted to stop munitions and military supplies from reaching Chinese troops. The Japanese blockaded railroads from Hong Kong to central China. Canton was poorly defended, and the Japanese military occupied the city in October 1938. Many inhabitants fled the city and went to the British colony of Hong Kong. When Hong Kong fell to the Japanese on Christmas day, 1941, the exiles moved to the Portuguese colony of Macau, or the interior of China. A considerable number of Chinese remained in Canton, as well as a few American Presbyterian missionaries. Alice M. Carpenter (1897–1985) and Alice H. Schaefer (1896–1972) remained at Ming Sum School for the Blind (Mingxin gumu xuexiao) until they were interned as enemy aliens on 7 December 1941, when the United Stated declared war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Chinese Principal of the school, Dr Huang Xuezhen (Wong Suet Ching, b.1881), then replaced her missionary colleagues, and protected blind students until the end of the war in 1945.

This chapter examines the everyday life of these three women – two American and one Chinese – as they worked in Japanese-occupied Canton from 1938 to 1945. Using missionaries’ public and private correspondence to their American audience, as well as official school publications, this chapter demonstrates the cooperation among American and Chinese women under occupation. It illustrates the way ethnic privilege shifted in wartime. The work of the three women enabled the school and its students to survive under occupation with limited resources. This chapter adds to the small literature about women's experiences in Japanese-occupied Canton to provide a wider context to this debate.

As the War department began planning for the largest U.S. armed forces engagement of the Second World War in September 1943, it simultaneously planned for the return and demobilization of eight million soldiers at the end of the war. Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, stipulated that soldiers who served in combat should come home before those who were newly arrived in the theaters of war. This policy was a reaction to the perception that combat soldiers had waited to return from France after the Great War while fresh recruits were demobbed quickly. As Marshall told the nation in a 10 May 1945 address, the objectives were to ‘determine what standards the enlisted men themselves believed should be taken into account in establishing priority of separation from the Army, and second, to see to it that these standards were applied on a basis that would actually insure the release of men as individuals in the fairest manner’. The plan, released in 1944, depended on a simple point system. Soldiers received one point for each month served. Additional points were given for each month served overseas. Servicemen received five points for each combat decoration received (this satisfied Marshall's stipulation about combat soldiers), and an additional eight points for each child under the age of 18. The system was referred to in War Department documents as the 1:1:5:8 plan. In theory both civilians and soldiers liked the plan. One of the underlying principles, however, was the belief that the Pacific war would not end until 1947 or 1948. When it became clear that some soldiers would have to wait while others were transported home, some servicemen and civilians were upset – some were upset enough to act. From September 1945 to June 1946, all across the U.S., wives of servicemen organized a pressure movement to accelerate demobilization.

The first of these groups, the Service Wives and Children Association, formed in Pittsburgh in September 1945. Mrs. Patricia Coffey ran a simple ad in the Pittsburg Press: ‘Attention – calling all mothers whose husbands are in the service’. Coffey included her phone number and received 500 calls. Ultimately, the Pittsburgh Service Wives and Children Association (SWCA) formed with 300 members. Although Coffey founded the organization, Nancy Mueller became president, and Dorothy Galomb and Nellie Hopkins served as secretary and treasurer, respectively.

Similar problems and questions return in the book’s third part, ‘Occupation’. This phenomenon occurred in the East, of course, on a significantly greater scale than in the West. The narrative focuses on the Russian occupation of Galicia in 1914–1915, the Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupation of Serbia at the end of 1915, the German occupation of Poland and the ‘Ober-Ost’ territories from the summer of that year, and the German occupation of Romania at the end of 1916. Regardless of local differences, a common trait turns out to be that the occupations during the First World War had more in common with the administration of the ‘Hinterland’ than with the Second World War occupations. The results are similar regarding research into the ‘civilizing mission’ – in other words, attempts to morally subjugate ‘half-Asians’, from the Balkans to Latvia, not only by the German army, but also through cultural means. These ranged – as is well known – from attempts to scientifically describe the new countries to education and hygiene. According to the book’s interpretation, despite the ignorance, ruthlessness, and arrogance of the occupiers, it is difficult to acknowledge these attempts as the beginning of the road leading to Auschwitz.

The spy craze that consumed the authorities of the combatant states was based on the belief that certain groups of civilians were privy to secret information that they were eager to pass on to the enemy. This proposition may have been true in regard to a few individuals, but in relation to society as a whole, or even a part thereof, it was nonsense. There is no better proof of this than the enormous hunger for up-to-date information that was felt by the populations of all the warring states. Civilians generally did not possess or provide the enemy with valuable information, yet they themselves often felt confused and were keen, if not desperate, to satisfy their own curiosity. This is evidenced by the extraordinary popularity of the newspapers (so-called war tourism) and all manner of rumours and gossip. Relatively new media – cinema and modern museums – were also harnessed in the service of information and propaganda.

How many people have heard of Przasnysz? Probably not many. In 1914, it was a small Mazovian town close to the southern border of East Prussia. Depending on the point of view, whether Russian or German, Przasnysz was situated on one of the main roads leading to East Prussia or, going in the opposite direction, to Warsaw.

A visitor wandering the streets of Vienna, Belgrade, Berlin, or Bucharest in the penultimate year of the Great War would have witnessed more or less the same scene in each of those cities: men in oversized suits or uniforms and women in dresses that had fitted them perfectly a few years earlier. The same visitor would have also noticed a proliferation of fruit and vegetable gardens, even in front of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. The difference between the hinterland and occupied territories was simple: in the former these miniature garden-plots were owned by local residents, whereas on the boulevards of Belgrade or Bucharest they were owned partly by the residents and partly by the occupier’s military units stationed nearby. Life during wartime was hardly better in one’s ‘own’ hinterland than it was in occupied territories.

On 21 November 1916, the octogenarian Emperor Franz Joseph died. His reign had lasted sixty-eight years. On 30 November, the funeral procession carried his remains to St Stephen’s Cathedral, and then to the nearby Habsburg family vault, the Capuchin crypt. A sense of bereavement pervaded even those who did not support the monarchy. The future social-democratic Chancellor of Austria (from 1970) Bruno Kreisky, who was five years old in 1916, recalled feeling bereft and desolate. No one remembered any other ruler. Before his demise, the Emperor supposedly confided to his valet that he feared his funeral toll would also signal the end of the Empire. Indeed, the new Emperor and King of Hungary Charles I (‘and the last’, many sneered) had slim chances of saving the monarchy, even if he proved to be a genius.

The empires experienced the nineteenth century in different ways, and their experience was generally a bad one. The only empire to emerge in Central and Eastern Europe at that time – the German Empire – was also the only one that could regard the decades leading up to 1914 as a success.Four powers figured on the map of Central and South-Eastern Europe in 1815: Prussia, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. At the outbreak of war a century later, the northern borders appeared remarkably stable. Germany shared a border with Russia on Polish soil. Austria had evolved into Austria-Hungary, but its northern border had barely changed; only in the south, following the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, did it extend much further than before. And indeed it was here, in the Balkans, that the changes were biggest, with the Ottoman Empire having lost its European foothold.

In March 1916 General Aleksei Alekseevich Brusilov was appointed commander of the Russian Southwest Front. He had been one of the most effective Russian commanders in the summer of 1914, and it was his army that had occupied Lwów in September. During the ‘great retreat’ in the spring of 1915 Brusilov once again proved himself to be able and level-headed. A year later he was seen as the man who was to change the course of the war on the Eastern Front.

In the first years of the war the Russian generals understood that without a huge increase in munitions production Czarism was doomed to fail. The army lacked everything. Only 10 per cent of the new recruits in the spring of 1915 received rifles. In March of that year, as the fighting ended in the Carpathians, Brusilov reported that his regiments were at between 25 and 50 per cent of their original strength.