Call number: LD2668 .T4 1966 M236 / Master of Science

Hitler claimed to have studied Clausewitz and Machiavelli, but violated the tenets of both by permitting ideology to override strategy. Hitler's ideology is revealed from documentary sources: Mein Kampf, his speeches, and Tischreden (table talks.) Operation Sea Lion, the planned 1940 invasion of England, was cancelled because the Fuhrer regarded the British as nordic cousins. Operation Citadel, the 1943 Battle of Kursk, was conceived because he decided the racially inferior Slav must be subdued. Doomed from the outset, Hitler nevertheless launched Citadel and squandered most of Germany's remaining armor and elite troops. A general staff officer is interviewed as witness to the period. His background, training, and opinions of the Fuhrer are presented. Thesis conclusion: flawed ideology brought disastrous decisions.

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.

No description available.

The debate about grand strategy in the Second World War has scarcely ended even in the 21st Century. The present study examines the classical issue of the grand strategy in Europe and the anti-Hitler coalition as concerns the US-UK-Soviet exchange about the Second Front. The great phenomenon of the Second World War was the creation of an unprecedented military alliance between the western powers and the Soviet Union. Due to mutual antagonism the inter-Allied cooperation during the Second World War was very complicated and at times extremely tense. Perhaps the most acute disagreement in the relationship between the Allies was the "Second Front" controversy. Despite desperate Soviet demands to open the Second Front as soon as possible, the Western Allies launched a massive cross-channel operation in the northwestern Europe only in June 1944. This thesis analyses the reasons of why it took the western powers so long to organize and execute such an operation and its implications for the post-war order. The detailed analysis of the grand strategy during the Second World War is one of the ways to comprehend the violent 20th Century amid the carnage of the 21st Century and its own problems of grand strategy.

M.A. / The aim of the present essay is the study of the Resistance which took place in the area of Kalavrita and Egialia between 1941-1944 and how it is re-lated to the Resistance in the rest of Greece, using everyday people’s memo-ries. More specifically, we are going to find the impact of the geomorphology of the area on the development of the Resistance and the importance of the lo-cal history and traditions on the development of the patriotic feeling of the ar-ea’s citizens. Moreover, we are going to study the factors which led to the crea-tion and development of Resistance, the impact of the Communist party and ideas and of other factors, and the role of the allies’ diplomacy. Although many books and essays have been written about that period of time, the history of Greek Resistance is not complete yet, as they used to em-phasise the patriotic aspect, minimizing the importance of the Resistance in so-cial aspects, and the impact on the lives of everyday people. Moreover, most of the local history talks about the facts in the town of Kalavrita, and less is known about the Resistance in the rest of Achaia. However, there are still un-exploited sources, like interviews, diaries and photos. Their study will result in a more complete understanding of the local history and also in the preservation of these important memories of the people who were alive at that time. For this study, the quality methods of interviews and field study will be used. Qualitative analysis will be used to extract similarities and differences with other studies, so as to generate new evidence for the local history. This essay will contain 3 major parts. In the 1st part, we are going to discuss what was happening in Greece just before the beginning of the 2nd World War. More specifically, we will speak about the position of the Greek expedition from the day of capitulation (April 1943), till the organisation of the Resistance towards the German and Italian expeditions. Then we are going to find out what was going on in the same period in the regions of Kalavrita and Egialia (summer 1943) during the first years of the war. Moreover, we are go-ing to explore the everyday life of the Greek people, how the Greek society changed due to German and Italian army and the more or less important facts which helped in the organisation of the local Resistance, as these facts were presented in the local newspapers. In the first part, we are going to speak exten-sively about the birth of the Greek Resistance. We will also speak about the re-sisting organised teams, armed or not, in the local area and in the whole of Greece which were related to the Resistance. More specifically, we are going to speak about the people who took part in these teams, the way they were or-ganised and the relations they had with each other and similar European teams. Also, we are going to find out the relations with the political parties, so as to discover the political ideas of these teams. Moreover, we will talk about the le-gal and illegal mass media of the time, the way they were organised and their importance in the development of Resistance, through the newspapers and the testimonies of the people who lived of that time.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of History, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History September 1992 / The central feature of service in the Second world War for black soldiers, was the continuation of racial discrimination along the lines of that 'experienced by them in civilian life in South Africa. This discrimination affected almost every aspect of military service; from recruitment and training,to their' deployment as unarmed soldiers in non-combatant duties in various units. This dissertatiQn uses both oral and archival sources to comment upon,and analyze the responses of black members of the Union Defence Force to their service in the war.These responses are at times complementary, and at Other times Contradictory but one general conclusion to be drawn from them, is that black soldiers felt their contribution to the south African war effort had gone large1y unrecognised, either in remunerative or socio-political terms. Black servicemen were not only discriminated against by both the state and individual whites in the Union Defence Force, they were also used inefficiencly in a military context. The views of certain white soldiers have been used to illustrate this, both from a contemporary perspective and a historical one. The hasty formation of the Corps in which blacks served; the Non-European Army Services, its administrative weaknesses, and occasional disunity in its leadership, also hampered the effective use of black servicemen in the war.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The present study deals with the relations of the Netherlands "London" Government with the German-occupied territory during World War II. The writer begins with the postulate that the London Government might be expected to provide in some measure for the maintenance of domestic order, for the welfare and safety of its citizens in the occupied territory; that it would be able to maintain communications with that territory; to serve as a focus for national unity; and to maintain its existence in order to assume authority at the time of liberation. Owing to the nature of the german occupation, the London Government could neither directly engage in "remote" administration nor provide directly for the welfare and safety of its citizens. A single major exception appears in an effective railway strike ordered by the London Government [TRUNCATED]

This dissertation is a history of the use of World War II-era American conscientious objectors as the subjects of medical research. Under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, conscientious objectors had two choices: provide noncombatant service within the military or provide work of national importance under civilian direction under the auspices of a program called Civilian Public Service (CPS). Conscientious objectors who chose assignment to CPS were placed in camps in which the men labored on a work project authorized by the U.S. Selective Service System, the government entity that administered the draft. At the outset of the CPS program, the camps were modeled after the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal jobs program. Over time, and largely due to protests that such Civilian Conservation Corps-type forestry and soil conservation work assignments were not the promised work of national importance, other types of CPS camps were developed, with work projects dealing with public health, custodial care for the mentally disabled, or scientific research. In the later, which became commonly known as the guinea pig units, over five hundred conscientious objectors voluntarily participated as research subjects for a diverse assortment of scientific studies, including projects that dealt with infectious diseases, diet, frostbite, psycho-acoustics, and the impacts of temperature extremes and of altitude. In addition to describing the creation and operation of the guinea pig units, this dissertation examines the use of American World War II conscientious objectors as research subjects in light of two specific questions: first, why did these men volunteer to be guinea pigs? And second, was the use of World War II-era conscientious objectors as research subjects in keeping with the ethical standards of the time? This dissertation draws upon a diverse array of sources to answer the question of motivation from the volunteers' perspectives. Likewise, this dissertation relies upon a wide array of sources to piece together what researchers of the day, both military and civilian, would have considered acceptable and unacceptable uses of people in the name of research.

Scholars of American politics often assume World War II liberalized white racial attitudes and prompted a liberal shift in the federal government's position on civil rights. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and civil rights activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not well-verified empirically. Using both survey and archival evidence, I argue the war's impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed, but that the war shaped and constrained the executive branch's civil rights agenda in ways institutional scholars have generally ignored. The evidence is presented in two parts: First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of slight liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation actually increased during the war, especially in the South. There is some evidence of racial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. However, the range of issues is limited in scope. Second, the war had both compelling and constraining impacts on the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' actions on civil rights. The war increased the probability of any change at all occurring, but in doing so it focused the civil rights agenda on issues of military segregation and defense industry discrimination, rather than a more general anti-segregation and job discrimination agenda. In summary, World War II had myriad impacts on America's racial order. It did not broadly liberalize white attitudes, but its effect on the White House was a precursor to the form of "Cold War civil rights" that would emerge in the 1950s.