This chapter situates contemporary Russian war memory in its twentieth-century historical context, exploring how and why the war victory gained such prominence and drawing out certain continuities and discontinuities across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. Given the immense scale of Soviet wartime losses and the unusually heavy-handed instrumentalization of history under Putin, the Second World War was bound to play a prominent role in Russian memory culture. Yet, as the chapter will show, the precise character of Russian war memory and its utility for the Kremlin derive overwhelmingly from decades of Soviet-era commemorative practices. The chapter does not attempt to rectify distortions of historical truth but rather to elucidate the mechanisms by which states repurpose the past in the service of the present. Soviet war memory, as elsewhere, was the product of internal debate and deliberation as the leadership wrestled with what were often pan-European issues of representation. The chapter therefore approaches the myth and memory of the Great Patriotic War as a particular manifestation of a universal impulse to ‘make sense’ of war in the modern world.

Collective memory of a historical event does not depend on its contemporary and historiographical significance alone. Germany’s selective memory of the Eastern Front is a case in point. It has been influenced by four developments. The problem of the prisoners of war that had remained in the Soviet Union, the ‘returnees’, and the veterans underlined the importance of the Eastern Front among the West German public. The Stalingrad myth, in particular, had a decisive influence on an image of war (in the East), according to which the Germans considered themselves first and foremost victims of that war. The critical discussion of the war and its nexus with the Holocaust after 1970 led to a turning point wherein the victims of the Germans became the focus of remembrance in West Germany. In the socialist satellite state of East Germany, the heroization of the Red Army was a characteristic feature of public war memories. Commemorations of the Eastern Front changed again in unified Germany after the Cold War – from the early years of Russia’s rapprochement to the dramatic deterioration of the German-Russian relationship.

This chapter analyzes discourses on universal economic and social human rights and social democracy in connection with intellectuals discussing the American and British war aims of World War II. It was an age of major societal transformations: the socialization of work due to industrial capitalism; experiences of authoritarian ideologies emerging out of, inter alia, extreme inequality; and nascent uproars against racism and imperialism. Human rights were part of moral discourses on equality and social justice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and critiques of laissez-faire capitalism. The chapter details how Ralph Bunche and George Herbert Wells championed a vision of social democracy and human rights. Bunche and Wells intervened in wartime when many intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum would write of human rights. Key intellectual actors increasingly referred to a new political “space” of “the world,” and some were redefining “democracy” as a “world” and a “social” democracy. Revisiting their thinking allows for a more detailed reconstruction of their argumentation, including on how, specifically, they defended economic and social human rights.

The dictatorial regime of Jorge Ubico silenced virtually all internal sociopolitical opposition in Guatemala during the interwar period (1931–44). To circumvent this restrictive political terrain, journalists Luz Valle and Gloria Menéndez Mina created literary journals ostensibly published with advice on home making and personal style which furtively cultivated an intellectual space that reflected transnational antifascist conversations. These journals served as incubators for antifascist, democratic ideals during a period of intense intellectual repression, ideals that revolutionary reformers translated directly into social and political democracy created by the October Revolution in 1944. Within a deeply patriarchal society, the journals’ gender analysis also expanded revolutionary vision of justice to include the political and social inclusion of women. Therefore, the extent to which the Guatemalan Revolution embraced antifascist ideals can be traced in part to the ideas published in Nosotras and Azul.

This chapter reveals how Caribbean Basin democracy and international antifascism came together during the 1944 Masacre Sampedrana. For over a decade, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Dominican exiles protested against the respective dictatorships of Tiburcio Carías, Anastasio Somoza, and Rafael Trujillo. With World War II, exiles tapped into the international struggle against fascism to invigorate their local anti-dictatorial efforts. They blended the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, and other antifascist symbols with their longstanding democratic ideals while networking with likeminded allies. Their struggle culminated in July 1944 as teachers, workers, and students utilized antifascist symbols when women spearheaded protests against Carías’ dictatorship. After the regime violently responded, anti-dictatorial individuals and groups throughout the greater Caribbean continued to blend antifascism and Latin American democracy to denounce the horrific Masacre Sampedrana and direct regional and international attention on the Honduran dictatorship.

The book examines Nationalist China’s military provisioning strategies during its war against Japan, from procurement and storage to transportation and seizure from the enemy, to make two broader points. Firstly, the conflict shows that the historical concept of total war should not be confined to modern technology as a means or to rapid victory as an end. Chinese thinkers christened their struggle against Japan a “total war,” but held a different vision of totality to accommodate China’s premodern resource base and commitment to protracted warfare. Secondly, logistics deserves more attention not just among military historians, but among all scholars of war. Its technicalities are a crucial window into the everyday experiences of ordinary actors who have been marginalized in historical scholarship.

The training of two all-black infantry divisions at Fort Huachuca during World War II is unprecedented in American history. Although it provides an insight into the contradictions of the US Army’s racial policy, this experiment has never been described before. This microhistory explores the agency of soldiers in the face of segregation and of their being treated as if they were inferior by the army.

The chapter illustrates what it meant for Carolyn Beatrice Parker (1917–1966) to be a Black woman physicist in the US during the Jim Crow era. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a teacher, shepherded her into Fisk University, an historically Black college. As a physics major she studied infrared spectroscopy with the Black physicist Elmer Imes, graduating with a BS in 1938. She later attended the University of Michigan, obtaining an MA in physics in 1941. But like many Black women, she spent time before and after graduate school teaching in the K–12 system. In 1943, she became a research physicist at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, where she stayed for four years. Although she co-authored a governmental report about her work on signal attenuation in coaxial cables, her name only appeared in the acknowledgments of the ensuing academic publications, thus partly obscuring her contributions. In 1947, Fisk University welcomed Parker on the faculty, but she soon after enrolled in a nuclear physics PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After dropping out, she worked as a laboratory technician until she grew too ill and died a short time later.

This chapter examines the redefinition of “youth” that occurred during World War II as a result of young men’s conscription and the rise of the United States as the global superpower, as well as its consequences for young Americans. It specifically looks at the creation and implementation of federal educational programs for soldiers, such as the Army Specialized Training Program and the educational provisions of the 1944 G. I. Bill of Rights. The chapter also demonstrates how these programs built upon the framework that had been developed in earlier decades, which categorized youth according to their value for national security and established military service as a “democratic” educational opportunity.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the book, as well as its major argument. It argues that, while historians have traditionally treated war and military issues as temporary issues that affected American society only during wartime and had little impact on society during peacetime, the issues were, in fact, fundamental to political and cultural changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines how the remainder of the book will support this argument by focusing on how the relationship formed during this time between national security, education, and the cultural conception of “youth” strongly influenced young people’s educational experiences and had significant social consequences that still exist today.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

This chapter explores how selective service laws for World War II both built on and changed the relationship between youth, education, and national security that had been developed in the preceding decades. Through nationwide debates over what made the disproportionate draft of young men aged eighteen to twenty-five as American and democratic, adults reinterpreted the characteristics of “youth” that had been deemed serious problems in the 1930s. That is, the lack of advanced work experience now indicated immediate availability for military service, unstable lifestyle meant mobility, and mental malleability now signified adaptability to military discipline. The supporters of the youth draft also formalized the link between military duty and education, advocating for the formation of military-educational training for young soldiers with military value as a democratic and American method of conscripting youth.