Amphibious operations are a topic central to the history of World War Two in the Pacific Theatre. The majority of research on this topic has been centred on the impact of American experiences and successes attributed to the development and evolution of amphibious warfare. The contributions of the United Kingdom and Japan to the development of amphibious warfare have been either overlooked or marginalized. This thesis will investigate the amphibious activities of all three powers both during and before the Pacific War, and seek to explain the importance of each nation's contribution to amphibious warfare. In addition, the thesis will demonstrate how in its highest forms amphibious operations became a fully fledged system of global force projection. The thesis will explain how each of these powers interpreted the legacy of the failure of the 1915 Gallipoli campaign both in the context of their own wartime experiences, and in their respective strategic worldviews. This interpretation is central to how each power prepared for amphibious operations in the next war. The importance of the geography of the Pacific Ocean to the evolution and development of amphibious warfare will be discussed, as will the advances in technology that allowed the creation of logistical systems to support these operations.

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This thesis explores the taking of Japanese remains as trophies by American servicemen during the Second World War in the Pacific. It examines the historical and contemporary motives for American trophy taking in modern warfare and shows that corporeal trophy taking was both prevalent and multifaceted and how Japanese war materials and bodies were repurposed into trophied objects that were recorded, kept, displayed, exchanged, and even celebrated both in the battlefield and on the home front. This study also recognizes and analyzes relatively new and useful sources of evidence, such as recently published memoirs, artifacts, and digital social media, to expand our understanding of corporeal trophy taking as it occurred during the Pacific War. / 10000-01-01

This paper thoroughly examines the production of the thesis film, Turtle Beach. Each area of the film’s production is carefully dissected, including the writing, production design, cinematography, directing, editing, sound, technology, workflow and visual effect. Specific attention has been paid to writing and cinematography, and how they affect editing.

In November of 1941, 1,973 Canadian soldiers and two nurses sailed from Vancouver for Hong Kong to garrison the British colony and help defend it in the event of a Japanese attack. The ensuing battle was a decisive defeat for the defenders. 555 Canadians never returned home, over half of those dying in captivity, either in Hong Kong or later once transferred to Japan. The prisoners would become Canada’s longest serving prisoners-of-war of the Second World War and arguably suffered worse than any others. Yet, despite the high casualties, 84 per cent of the 1,684 initial captives survived the ordeal as prisoners in Hong Kong. Once one begins to understand what these men went through, it seems remarkable that so many of them managed to survive at all. This thesis explores Canadian survival in Hong Kong prison camps and the various methods these captives used to overcome boredom, violence, disease, hunger, loneliness, and hopelessness. Using as a research basis clandestine diaries, journals, memoirs, and letters to and from family members, this thesis argues that the Canadians survived due to strong leadership, commitment to duty, creative ingenuity, and a firm determination to return to their families. Uncertainty was an unyielding enemy from day to day and the Hong Kong POWs had to rely on themselves and their compatriots to keep mentally sharp and physically fit. Canadian prisoners in Hong Kong were abused by their captors, fed meager rations, suffered a myriad of tropical diseases, and lived in appalling conditions. The fact that so many survived is a testament to their courage and resilience. This thesis will show how they did it.

This study investigates journalistic representations and discursive constructions of memories of the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45) in three newspapers from three East Asian countries: Japan, China, and South Korea. These three countries have been having decades-long debates over how to interpret and recount what happened in East Asia during the war. Numerous people perished during the wars Japan waged in pursuit of its ambition to be a great Asian empire. The debates over war memories intensified during the past decade due to “memory politics” in the region. Among the many atrocities that have been the subject of international disputes, this study explores media discourses of three of the most heated controversies associated with the Asia-Pacific War: the Yasukuni Shrine controversy, the “Comfort Women” controversy, and the Japanese textbooks revisionism controversy. There are two theoretical groundings that support this study: “memory and politics,” and “journalistic discourses of memory.” Regarding memory and politics, this study approaches the topic from a collective/cultural memory perspective. In this regard, the three controversies over war memories were theoretically identified as sites of memory by which war memories were articulated and reinvented. As for the journalistic aspect, this study focuses on the cultural meanings of journalism and news. The cultural approach in journalistic study views texts as cultural artifacts that represent key values and meanings. Journalism plays a major role in creating, transmitting, and articulating memories. A critical discourse analysis was the primary method that was employed to investigate the discursive constructions of memory through news texts. An interpretive policy analysis was also conducted to examine official stances of the three countries with respect to war memories. The analysis has found that the three newspapers were agents of collective memory. They articulated the meanings of national memory based upon what they believed to be the most appropriate interpretations of their nations’ past. Political circumstances and ideological stances greatly influenced their coverage of war memories. Their coverage has shown that East Asia still lives under the shadow of the Asia-Pacific War that ended more than a half century ago. Memory has not been forgotten because it has been reinterpreted and reconstructed mirroring the national, social, political, and international climate. Situated at the center of such reproduction of memory, the three newspapers were also sites of memory. The three newspapers’ active involvement in the historical controversies exceeded what scholars described as common features of commemorative journalism. The controversies surrounding war memories and the newspapers’ construction of memory have shown that journalism is a cultural practice and that a cultural approach is necessary in journalism studies to gain a more holistic understanding of the representation of social events in the news.

This thesis proposes a new perspective on Malaysian Chinese studies by exploring issues of identity formation refracted through the lens of contestations of war memory, communal history and state-sponsored national history. In multiethnic Malaysia, despite persistent nation-building programs towards inculcating a shared Malaysian national identity, the question as to whether the Chinese are foremost Chinese or Malaysian remains at the heart of Malaysian socio-political debates. Existing scholarship on the Malaysian Chinese is often framed within post-independent development discourses, inevitably juxtaposing the Chinese minority condition against Malay political and cultural supremacy. Similarly, explorations of war memory and history echo familiar Malay-Chinese, dominant-marginalised or national-communal binary tropes. This thesis reveals that prevailing contestations of memory and history are, at their core, struggles for cultural inclusion and belonging. It further maps the overlapping intersections between individual (personal/familial), communal and official histories in the shaping of Malaysian Chinese identities. In tracing the historical trajectory of this community from migrants to its current status as ‘not-quite-citizens,’ the thesis references a longue durée perspective to expose the motif of Otherness embedded within Chinese experience. The distinctiveness of the Japanese occupation of British Malaya between 1941-1945 is prioritised as a historical watershed which compounded the Chinese as a distinct and separate Other. This historical period has also perpetuated simplifying myths of Malay collaboration and Chinese victimhood; these continue to cast their shadows over interethnic relations and influence Chinese representations of self within Malaysian society. In the interstices between Malay-centric national history and marginalised Chinese war memory lie war memory silences. These silences reveal that obfuscation of Malaysia’s wartime past is not only the purview of the state; Chinese complicity is evident in memory-work which selectively (mis)remembers, rejects and rehabilitates war memory. In excavating these silences, the hitherto unexplored issue of intergenerational memory transmission is addressed to discern how reverberations of the wartime past may colour Chinese self-image in the present. The thesis further demonstrates that the marginalisation of Chinese war memory from official historiography complicates the ongoing project of reconciling the Malaysian Chinese to a Malay-dominated nationalist dogma.

During the South Pacific campaigns of World War II, the United States Navy faced a formidable challenge in waging nighttime surface battles against the Japanese Navy. In a war that emphasized the carrier and battleship, the little destroyer became a key player in these actions. By studying this campaign from the perspective of the destroyers, three key factors emerge that allowed the Americans to achieve victory: innovation in tactics, adaption of technology, and efficient use of resources. The research for the thesis was based upon action reports, oral histories, and other documents obtained from the National Archives, Naval War College, Naval History and Heritage Command Center, and East Carolina University. The Japanese perspective was attained from numerous secondary sources. Innovation in tactics, technology, and resources allowed the Americans to persevere through severe defeats to achieve success against a very skilled Japanese Navy in the seas of the South Pacific.

(in English): This master's thesis focus on the repatriation of Koreans from Japan after World War II. The repatriation process was in many aspects more complicated than it could seem to be at the first sight. A hindrance to the repatriation of more than 2 million Koreans, who were left behind in Japan after the end of war, was vague politics of Supreme Command for Allied Powers (SCAP). SCAP did not possess any specific plan considering Koreans and other foreigners in Japan after its arrival to the Japanese archipelago. Therefore, the government of Japan was the one who seized upon the Korean repatriation and began sending ships from Japan's islands loaded with Korean laborers and soldiers, who were living testimony of its war crimes and a thread for Japanese public order. The government of Japan, however, was limited by number of ships, which it could provide for transportation of Koreans, and by number of available ports. As the waiting time for boarding on a repatriation ship was getting longer and longer, majority of Koreans could not wait anymore. In those cases, they usually decided to rent a small vessel, by which they got transported to the Korean peninsula. Those vessels, however, were making their voyages without a permission and were easy target for pirates or typhoons, which were...

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