This thesis describes the relationship between post-Second World War discourses and postcolonialism as observed in a selection of works by expatriate 'postmemory' authors after the Second World War and the Indian Partition. With global consequences which are still felt today, the Holocaust can no longer be understood as a singled-out event. Through their various works, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, and W.G. Sebald offer a range of comparable strategies for further personal engagement with the past - not just in Europe or in South Asia, but in both places together. The thesis shows that the expatriate writer - defined by his or her temporal and spatial distance from the subject matter - can be understood not only as someone who mediates between there and here, but also between past and present. Thinking of the expatriate writer as someone between two worlds is technically reminiscent of the traumatised person who is unable to negotiate between the two worlds of victims and outsiders. The expatriate writer can make use of rupture, distance, and partial identity, and is therefore in a privileged position when it comes to highlighting incomplete (hi)stories. The fictional texts examined in this thesis are examples of multidirectional memory in several ways: firstly through the connection to other nations' histories and secondly through reaching out to the reader. The reader's active engagement with the text is fundamental in the process of establishing meaning, which at the same time challenges the status of master narratives. Even if hardly anyone speaks of a traumatic style, this is where I would ultimately situate this research, as to varying degrees these works use narrative strategies that already include and point to another trauma, be that the Second World War or colonialism.

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During the Second World War, the British Government established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) for the purpose of coordinating ‘all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’. Although the overseas operations of this branch of the British Secret Services are relatively well known, no previous study has assessed the organisation’s UK based infrastructure. This thesis represents the first time the entire UK property portfolio of a clandestine government agency has been assessed. By addressing this gap in our knowledge, this thesis has increased the number of identified properties operated by SOE by 30%. This was achieved by undertaking a desk based assessment which combined pre-existing historical and archaeological methodologies. At the start of the Second World War, there were few existing facilities established within the UK to support clandestine operations. As the conflict progressed, in parallel to learning the operational procedures of their trade, SOE also had to rapidly expand their support infrastructure. The organisation could only effectively function by establishing facilities dedicated to training, research and development, supply, transportation, communication and command and control. These facilities, when required, combined reflectivity and innovation. It was, however, SOE’s preference to utilise pre-existing structures, where feasible, instead of erecting new buildings. Those facilities which were constructed were generally unique to the organisation. By assessing SOE’s UK property portfolio, this thesis goes some way to countering the often held notion that the organisation was ‘amateurish’.

Air Raid Precautions (ARP) for the protection of civilians during the Second World War was a new concept in the history of the defence of Britain. Each local authority was by the ARP Act of 1937 to be responsible for providing an ARP scheme for its residents. The history of ARP has tended to focus on central issues at national level or on London and certain provincial cities. This could suggest that the war experience and contribution at the local level of towns was less significant. For this reason it is important to provide an outer London suburban case study to discover how a small district prepared its civil defence, performed in emergencies and what contributions were made to the defence of the town by the local residents. The study has focussed on the small suburban towns of Kingston, Surbiton and Malden. Evidence is submitted of the capability of the respective civil defence services. Firstly, by the development and organisation of these resources and the state of readiness at the declaration of war. Secondly, by presenting details that reveal the satisfactory work of the civil defence personnel during emergencies caused by enemy action. Confirmation is given regarding the resilience of the residents of these towns who endured air raids and missile attacks. This includes an analysis of unpublished Home Office Intelligence reports concerning the state of the morale of the people of Surbiton and Malden in the aftermath of the air raids suffered in 1940. My research shows how these suburban towns were defended by their local authority ARP service, the shared dangers experienced by the local residents and the high state of morale of the citizens.

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Following their breaching of German dams in May 1943, No. 617 Squadron, Royal Air Force, was maintained as a specialist precision bombing unit. For the remainder of the Second World War the Squadron carried out precision attacks using new and unconventional weapons, culminating with Barnes Wallis’s deep penetration bombs, TALLBOY and GRAND SLAM. This thesis will show that the numerous accounts of the Squadron’s history have failed to take account of many factors that determined its role. By concentrating on the operational record and weapons, both popular historians and scholars have given a distorted and interpretatively incomplete description of the Squadron’s development. This in turn has led to an incomplete perception of the Squadron’s Development and a misconception of its full contribution to the bomber offensive. This thesis identifies policy and decision making bodies and examines their role in selecting weapons and targets for the Squadron. It explores the issues which determined the role played by the Squadron: changes in Air Staff policy for Bomber Command, choice of targets, the development and production of weapons, and tactical requirements. Comparison is made between the planners’ original intentions and the final operational record. Many of the Squadron’s operations emerged from an inability to follow through from initial planning. Such failure resulted from factors that included unrealistic expectations of weapon performance, delays in the development of new weapons, and political intervention. Alternative targets were selected not only to take advantage of the Squadron’s existing capabilities but also to address specific issues that were often imposed on the planners by outside agencies which would have otherwise diverted Bomber Command from the main offensive. In other instances the Squadron was used to supplement existing operations carried out by main force. The gestation time for new weapons was such that when a weapon emerged its originally intended targets were no often longer relevant. Accordingly, new targets had to be found. The Squadron’s role in the development and assessment of weapons, equipment and new techniques for the Command is revealed to be greater than previously recognised. This new approach to the Squadron’s wartime role examines the policy and planning backstory to the Squadron’s operations. It reveals a hitherto unrecognised complexity in the evolution of the Squadron’s role, and demonstrates how haphazard delays and setbacks were transformed into new policy to meet ever changing requirements.

Despite considerable interest in the BBC European Service and the role of transnational broadcasting during the Second World War, surprisingly little attention has hitherto been paid to the BBC Polish language broadcasts. As the first full length academic study of the wartime BBC Polish Service, this thesis aims to provide an in-depth examination of previously unanalysed primary sources, both Polish and British, in order to establish the extent to which Polish Service broadcasts during World War II were considered as a significant and reliable source of information. The study is primarily based on the BBC Written Archives records, in particular, the scripts of the BBC Polish language bulletins, the European News Directives and Minutes of Meetings as well as the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) directives for the Polish Service from the National Archives at Kew. These directives are central in answering the principal research question, namely the extent to which the Polish Service was required to follow official British government policy. To this end, the analysis is supported by Polish government-in-exile documents and the Polish Underground reports stored at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust in London. These archives represent a valuable resource for studies of wartime broadcasting, censorship and propaganda. Together the various archives (in conjunction with other privately held documents) offer historians a rich source of material from which the organisation and functioning of the BBC Polish Service over this period can be constructed. Given the volume of material related to World War II, the scope of the study is concentrated upon Whitehall and BBC policy with regards to the Polish Service coverage of the Polish-Soviet affairs from the period when diplomatic relations between Poland and the USSR were re-established in 1941 to the withdrawal of recognition of the Polish government-in-exile by the Allies in 1945. The analysis demonstrates that, although the Polish Service attempted to be objective, impartial and neutral, this was achieved by selectiveness rather than by presenting both Polish and Soviet sides of the argument in territorial and political disputes. In particular, after the secret agreement between the Big Three was signed at Tehran in 1943, attempts were made by British officials to use the Polish Service as a platform to convince the Polish Underground and, by extension, the Polish population, to agree to Stalin’s demands. In general, any subjects which could be perceived by Stalin as offensive were labelled as ‘sensitive’ and expunged from the broadcasts. The evidence in this thesis therefore suggests that the overall output of the Polish service was at times subject to wider constraints determined by allied foreign policy goals and in particular the relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

While much has been written about British support for Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War, this thesis offers a novel framework through which to consider this topic. It explores the popular humanitarian response to ‘Spain’ within the context of Britain’s bourgeoning civil society and popular political culture, following the advent of mass democracy in 1928. There has perhaps been a recent tendency amongst historians to underplay the breadth of British support for the Spanish Republic, and to suggest that the humanitarian character of this support was, very often, indicative of a detached and apolitical response. This thesis asks why the Spanish Republic had the unique appeal that it did, examining how people in Britain framed the conflict in Spain, and exploring what they did in practice in terms of raising humanitarian aid for, and awareness about, the Republican cause. In particular it does this by considering the response to ‘Spain’ within the peace movement, Co-operative movement and amongst British Christians. The thesis challenges the idea that many of those involved with the humanitarian campaigns saw Spain as a distant country and that they were detached from events there. It argues that, while political interpretations of the Spanish conflict were far from uniform, the plight and cause of the Republic resonated with notions of British identity in the 1930s, and with the crises that different groups and individuals perceived to be threatening their world order. It explores how the topic of non-intervention was debated within civil society and argues that support for this policy was not necessarily indicative of isolationism. It suggests that support for Republican Spain, even where it was largely ‘humanitarian’ in character, went alongside interest in the issues surrounding the conflict and is illustrative of a degree of both democratic engagement and popular internationalism within 1930s Britain.

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The outmanoeuvring of Allied forces in May 1940 led to the eventual evacuation of the BEF from the continent in June 1940. Fearing an invasion, GHQ Home Forces set about the rapid re-militarisation of the UK to oppose, arguably, the first very real threat to this country’s sovereignty since the Norman conquest of 1066 AD. Constructing a series of anti-invasion defences throughout the countryside, a network of defensive fieldworks and concrete gun emplacements were erected, with linear stop lines forming part of the overall stratagem for a countrywide defence in depth. Examining one particular linear stop line, GHQ Line Green, despite previous research into its archaeological route through the landscape several questions still remain unanswered - Did the proposed wartime route for the stop line match the documented archaeology? Did the defensive fieldworks conform to 1940 WO specifications, or were they similar in design to the linear fieldworks of the First World War? Did GHQ Line Green dismiss the defensive ‘folly’ notion of the Maginot Line by being strategically sited in the Bristol hinterland? A prepared battlefield that never faced the unpredictable test of conflict, evidence offered by original cartographic, archaeological and GIS ‘Fields-of- Fire’ analysis concluded that the GHQ Line Green was strategically placed in the landscape. In ideal conditions GHQ Line Green could have had limited success in slowing down an invasion force. This dismisses the notion that the stop line was a defensive ‘folly’. With its origins found to lay in First World War fortifications, the research undertaken for this thesis will further our understanding of an often forgotten Second World War landscape.