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Throughout the Second World War, the Canadian Red Cross Society (CRCS) exerted its significant influence in the field of voluntary homefront labour to provide a vast number of services for the benefit of Canadian, Commonwealth and Allied servicemen, prisoners of war, and civilians affected by the horrors of war. These wartime programs, which cost the Society over $90 000 000, were made possible through voluntary contributions of millions of dollars from Canadian citizens mainly through the yearly Red Cross national campaigns. Because of the organization’s claim to reach over cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, it benefitted from the support of various national groups within Canada. Another important group of contributors to the Red Cross structure were women who formed the backbone of the organization’s structure. Women served in nearly every capacity within the CRCS, which allowed them to gain valuable experience in a working environment outside of the home.

Controlled dispatch of selected staff to factories abroad in the years 1938--1941 played an important role in the history of Bata Shoe Company. Due to that fact the company man-aged to preserve civilian character of the production despite the on-going Second World War. The organizing of the whole process was not a simple task, it was necessary to harmonize actions of several organizational units. The selection of certain employees eligible for the transfers to foreign countries was conducted by sophisticated methodology, but still some of the top manager's decisions were quite controversial. First of all it involved the transfers of Jewish employees, because Chairman of the Board Jan Antonin Bata considered himself to be the rescuer of the Jews. Nevertheless top managers of the group were strictly pragmatic even in this matter and it is difficult to deduce that one of the objectives of the controlled staff transfers was the protection of this national minority. We can see the same rational approach to employees of the German origin. One of the unexplained questions is the Jan Antonin Bata's unclear relationship with Nazi leaders. I tried to deal with all of these questions in this thesis and I tried to contribute to the current debate about the Bata Group's activities during the Second World War.

Recently, various crises have occurred that have reminded Swedish authorities of the preparations needed to manage such phenomena. The recent crises are the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the man-made climate crisis. The aim of this study is to show how urban agriculture can be used to mitigate negative impacts from future crises. This thesis examines different methods used during the Second World War in Uppsala when its citizens turned to urban agriculture to sustain themselves, by studying the local newspaper, archival material, and photographs. While Sweden was neutral during the war, it still suffered the effects of the conflict, such as rations on food and decreased imports on fertilizers, which brought on the need for creating allotment gardens and land lots. This in turn changed the appearance of the cityscape of Uppsala. This thesis will trace the changes made in the urban environment through a lens of crisis studies. Thus, learning from history, a new solution to climate change and future crises are proposed.

This thesis will examine the British way of war as experienced by two British Infantry Divisions - the 43rd ‘Wessex’ and 53rd ‘Welsh’ - during the Overlord campaign in North West Europe in 1944 and 1945. The main locus of research centres on the fighting components of those divisions; the infantry battalions and their supporting regiments. In order to understand the way the British fought this part of the war, the thesis will consider the British Army’s history since 1918: its level of expertise at the end of the First World War; the impact of inter-war changes, and the experience of the early part of the Second World War, as these factors were fundamental in shaping how the British Army operated during the period covered in this study. These themes will be considered in the first chapter. The following seven chapters will study each of the two infantry divisions in turn, to maintain a chronological order. This is so that the experiences of each division can be examined in a logical way, from their initial experiences of combat in late June 1944 through to March 1945. Naturally, their major battles will be considered but so will their minor engagements and day-to-day experiences, as this will give a good, detailed, overview of each division’s campaign. This layout of chapters is also convenient for allowing comparisons between the two divisions as the campaign progressed. This thesis contains several strands of enquiry which will consider how Montgomery’s prosecution of the war actually translated to the smaller units of the division (the battalions, 4 companies, platoons and sections). The historiography for this campaign tends to suggest that the British Army fought the war in a cautious way, and that this approach was characterised by the use of overwhelming material superiority and rehearsed set piece attacks; tactics that were designed not only to destroy the enemy, but also to avoid the heavy casualties of the major battles of the First World War; a factor that was perceived to be vital to the maintenance of fragile infantry morale. Although the basic premise of a ‘cautious’ British way of war is generally accepted (along with its attendant emphasis on consolidation of objectives rather than exploitation of opportunities, and a reliance on adherence to lengthy orders), this study will conclude that the way the war was fought at sub-divisional levels was frequently at a pace that did not allow for such caution. Instead, it was characterised by command pressure to achieve results quickly, hasty planning and a reliance on massive artillery and mortar contributions to compensate for deficiencies in anti-tank and armoured support. This thesis will further conclude that a conscious policy of casualty conservation appears not to have been a priority at divisional command level, but was instead a consideration for company, platoon and section commanders and the men that they led.

The Swedish refugee policy during the 1930’s and during the beginning of the Second World War can be described as restrictive. In the year 1939 the number of refugees in Sweden was about 4000. By the year 1945 the number was approximately 200 000. The responsibility for the reception of the refugees was mainly the governments. Since the late 1920’s, Swedish politics where largely formed by the Social Democratic party’s idea of the welfare state. Central to this idea and embodied in society was labour as almost a moral obligation. This thesis examines the relationship between the refugees, government bodies and the labour market policies in Sweden during the years for the Second World War. The purpose is to explore the government’s labour markets bodies’ relationship to refugees and labour by studying the government’s state officials. How was this relationship organized? Much of the previous research in the related area has focused on the government’s bodies rather than their state officials. Therefor this thesis adds a new perspective to this research area. The main questions of interest are how the labour market government bodies and their state officials where organized, and the challenges they were put before in the meeting with the refugees.A hypothesis for the thesis is that refugee reception and labour market politics are linked. A natural step in the reception of refugees is for government bodies to mediate them to the labour market. Refugees tend over time to transfer to labourers. A sociological theoretical approach in the thesis is that the individual is subordinated to the governing structure. In this regard, the state officials are to be seen as acting agents through the governing structure. Hence, two following questions regarding their autonomy in this structure are interesting: where the state officials to be regarded as agents acting out the policies directed to them? Where they also able to form policies? The primary source material consists of memorandums, reports and correspondence written by state officials. The research methodology is qualitative.The thesis results show that much of the government bodies’ work was made up by compromise and the ability to adapt to the current circumstances, dictated by the war. The state officials also seem to have been able to, in smaller cases, form policies. But mainly their actions should be regarded as part of a collective larger formative element (“formativt moment”) - the war itself dictated their options and formed Swedish labour market policies. The thesis also points to new areas of research. Could the same research model be applied on other, for example neutral, countries during the same period? Keywords: The Second World War, refugee reception, refugees, labour market policies, state officials

Le champ littéraire belge francophone du second après-guerre n'a jamais fait l'objet d'une étude approfondie et exhaustive. Après avoir rappelé les conditions littéraires et culturelles de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, nous étudions l'épuration du champ littéraire, à savoir la réorganisation de celui-ci, par des instances qui lui sont extérieures. Nous analysons ensuite les rapports entre les écrivains et les institutions publiques et littéraires, avant de nous atteler à la description du champ littéraire de l'après-guerre. Nous tentons d'y décrire la position et les prises de positions des différents agents en présence. Se déploie alors en filigrane l'image d'une institution littéraire faible, incapable de faire émerger un nombre conséquent des auteurs de l'époque.

Many historians have presented the narrative of Canada’s Second World War experience as a “good” war. Individuals and communities came together in patriotism and a common purpose to furnish the national war effort with military manpower, labour, financial contributions, and voluntary efforts. As the dark years of the Great Depression gave way to unprecedented levels of industrial and economic growth, falling unemployment rates, increased urbanization, and a wealth of social programs, Canada’s future was bright. However, this optimistic picture is not representative of Canada as a whole. Some regions fared better than others, and industrial Cape Breton was one of those that benefited the least from the opportunities presented by the war. Glace Bay, Cape Breton’s largest mining town and long-time hotbed of industrial strife and labour radicalism, serves as an ideal case study of the region’s largely unprofitable and unchanging wartime experience. Long plagued by poverty, poor living conditions, and underdeveloped industry, and desperately seeking to break free of its destitution, Glace Bay tried and failed to take advantage of wartime opportunities for industrial diversification and local improvement.

The Kindertransport brought close to 10,000 unaccompanied minors to Britain on a trans-migrant basis between 1938 and 1939. The outbreak of war turned this short-term initiative into a longer-term episode. This PhD is a study of Scotland’s Kindertransport story and an evaluation of the Kindertransportees’ experiences of reception, care and nurture between 1938 and 1945. It also considers the wider implications of the Kindertransport upon the Kindertransportees’ broader life stories after 1945, namely further migration and resettlement. This thesis will unite a number of disparate areas of research, including British philanthropy and welfare, Anglo/Scottish Jewry, Zionism and migrant/refugee studies. It will be shown that Scotland’s reception of the Kindertransportees was highly varied and marked by many different agendas. These were fundamentally responsive to British interests. Growing up in Scotland exposed the Kindertransportees to a variety of different types of care. These were strongly tied to their Scottish context and mirror experiences of the Scottish child in care. Kindertransportees’ nurture invited important changes in their connection to Judaism. Nonetheless, an epitaph to a lost Jewish generation is inappropriate. Zionism emerges as an important Jewish connection. Nevertheless, Kindertransportees did not en-masse adopt Zionist goals or make Aliyah. Yet, at the same time, they did not usually remain in Scotland. Resettlement patterns show that there was a mass exodus of Kindertransportees across the Scottish borders. However, these Kindertransportees still exhibit a connection to Scotland as well as to Scottish communities in the diaspora. They express a profound fondness to all things imagined to be Scottish.

The use of classical music as a tool of propaganda in Britain during the War can be seen to have been an effective deployment both of the German masters and of a new spirit of England in the furtherance of British values and its point of view. Several distinctions were made between various forms of propaganda and institutions of government played complementary roles during the War. Propaganda took on various guises, including the need to boost morale on the Home Front in live performances. At the outset of the War, orchestras were under threat, with the experience of the London Philharmonic exemplifying the difficulties involved in maintaining a professional standard of performance. The activities of bodies such as the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts played a role in encouraging music, as did the British Council’s Music Advisory Committee, which co-operated with the BBC and the government, activities including the commissioning of new music. The BBC’s policies towards music broadcasting were arrived at in reaction to public demand rather than from an ideological basis and were developed through the increasing monitoring of German broadcasts and a growing understanding of what was required for both home and overseas transmission. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony became an important part of the Victory campaign and there was even an attempt at reviving the Handel Cult of the Nineteenth Century. German music was also used in feature film but pre-eminent composers such as William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams contributed to the War effort by writing film music too. The outstanding example is Vaughan Williams’ music for Powell and Pressburger’s Ministry of Information sponsored 49th Parallel, in which the relationship between music and politics is made in a reference to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Vaughan Williams’ non-film output included the greatest British orchestral work to have come out of the War, his Fifth Symphony; a work that encapsulated all the values that the institutions of public life sought to promote.